A supervisory board approves a modest annual budget line for executive coaching with barely a comment, the kind of item that passes on the consent agenda between an expenses policy update and a note on succession planning. Nobody in the room asks the question that will matter most once the engagement actually begins. Is the client the chief executive receiving the coaching, the board that is paying for it, or some blend of the two that nobody has bothered to define before the first invoice arrives. Left unresolved, that ambiguity tends to surface at the worst possible moment, usually when the coaching has uncovered something the board did not expect to hear.
Two Bodies, One Executive
The question is sharper in jurisdictions that use two-tier board structures. Germany uses formally separate management and supervisory boards for stock corporations, while Dutch companies may use either a two-tier or one-tier structure, with a supervisory board required for certain companies. Under that model, the management board runs the business and the supervisory board oversees it, and the two are formally separate: nobody sits on both at once, unlike the unitary boards common in the United Kingdom and the United States, where executives and non-executives share a single table. The chief executive in a two-tier system is judged, formally and continuously, by people who are structurally excluded from the room where the daily decisions get made. Supervisory directors read reports, hear quarterly updates, and form a picture of the chief executive’s judgement almost entirely at a distance.
That distance is precisely why coaching becomes attractive to a supervisory board, and precisely why it becomes complicated. From the board’s side, coaching looks like a lever they can pull on a person they cannot otherwise directly observe or shape day to day. From the chief executive’s side, coaching commissioned by the body that decides their reappointment looks, at least initially, less like support and more like scrutiny wearing a friendlier name. Both readings are reasonable, and an engagement that never addresses the tension between them tends to satisfy neither party. A chief executive who suspects the coach is quietly reporting back will withhold exactly the material that would make the sessions useful, and a board that never states its intentions clearly has given the chief executive every reason for that suspicion.
Unitary boards, where executives and non-executives sit together around the same table, face a milder version of the same puzzle whenever they fund development for a member of the executive team. The two-tier structure simply makes the separation explicit and permanent rather than a matter of committee membership and meeting invitations, which is why the client question tends to surface there with unusual clarity. It is not that unitary boards avoid the issue; it is that the two-tier model forces it into the open earlier, because there is no shared table on which an informal conversation about it could happen by accident.
The Decision Hiding Inside the Decision
A board that funds coaching for its chief executive has, whether it realises it or not, already made one of two quite different decisions. The first is a genuine commitment to development: the board believes the executive is worth investing in, wants their judgement sharpened, and is prepared to let the process go wherever it needs to go, including toward findings the board itself may not enjoy. The second is closer to a documentation exercise: the board wants a record that development was offered, useful if a future capability question arises, without much expectation that the engagement will change anything in particular. Both are legitimate reasons to commission coaching. The trouble starts when a board believes it is doing the first while behaving, in the small print of how the engagement is scoped, like it is doing the second.
The tell is usually in the goal-setting. A board genuinely committed to development will let the coaching agenda be shaped substantially by what the coach and the chief executive discover together, even if that agenda drifts from the board’s original brief. A board quietly doing the second thing will want a tightly specified brief, narrow success criteria, and regular assurance that nothing outside the brief is being discussed. Neither approach is dishonest, but a chair who has not been explicit, even with themselves, about which one is happening will find the engagement drifting toward confusion by the second quarter.
What the Chair Should Settle First
Several questions are worth resolving before the first session rather than after an awkward one. Confidentiality is the most obvious: what the coach discusses with the chief executive should sit under a boundary the chair states plainly at the outset, with any legal, ethical, or safety-related exceptions to confidentiality explicitly agreed before coaching begins. Coaching that promises perfect confidentiality while quietly expecting the coach to flag concerns is a contradiction the chief executive will sense even if it is never written down. Goal ownership needs equal clarity: whether the chief executive, the chair, or some joint process sets the agenda, and how that agenda gets adjusted as the work progresses. And the hardest question, often left unasked, is what happens if the coaching surfaces something closer to a board-level problem than an individual development need: a structural conflict between the chief executive and a supervisory director, for instance, or a strategic disagreement dressed up as a personality clash.
TRUE Leadership, the Dutch executive coaching practice founded by Arvid Buit, has written specifically about this dynamic, on the grounds that coaching a chief executive across a two-tier board only works once the chair and the coach have agreed where the reporting boundary sits, rather than discovering it by accident partway through the engagement. That sequencing matters more than any particular answer to the confidentiality or goal-ownership questions. A board that settles these matters explicitly, even imperfectly, gives the coaching a chance to do real work. A board that leaves them implicit is quietly setting up a moment, usually months in, where the chief executive and the supervisory board discover they had different assumptions about who the coach was actually serving, and by then the engagement has already lost the trust it needed to be useful.
None of this is an argument against supervisory boards commissioning coaching, which remains one of the more sensible interventions available to a board worried about a chief executive’s judgement without wanting to intervene directly in operational decisions. It is an argument for treating the commissioning conversation as governance work in its own right, not as an administrative formality that happens to involve a coach.
