Executive coaching

Tell the sponsor what they are paying for, and what stays in the room.

Executive coaches are retained for one person whose decisions affect everyone else. The proposal should separate what the sponsor will know from what stays in the room, and name the working pattern over the timeline.

What the sponsor is allowed to know

Write the confidentiality in plain sentences. The sponsor hears the themes the leader agrees to share, and whether the sessions happened. The sponsor does not hear the contents. A proposal that fudges this will be misread by a board that expects a report on the person, which is not coaching.

Name the leader and the sponsor as roles if you should not use names in a document that might be forwarded. Say how many people are in the engagement. One leader is not a team facilitation, and a proposal that blurs them will be staffed wrong.

The working pattern

Sessions, length, and the stretch of calendar. Six sessions across four months is a product. 'Support through a transition' is not. Include the first conversation with the sponsor and the last one. Those two are part of the work and are often forgotten in the fee.

You do not promise a personality change or a business result. You promise attention on the decisions the leader names, on a cadence. If the sponsor wants a guaranteed improvement in a metric, that is a different contract and you should say you will not sign it.