1:1 Executive Coaching
Most coaching helps you find your own answer. That's useful, and it's not enough on its own.
This is built around what's actually in front of you. The decision this month, the room next week, the person you can't read. We work it together, and when my read of the situation saves you from learning something the expensive way, I give you that too.
Every session is with me. Every conversation comes out of having run the kind of organization you're in, not having studied one.
Six months minimum, because anything shorter doesn't hold.
I WAS AN ATTORNEY FIRST. THEN I RAN THE WHOLE THING.
I was an attorney first, and I still am. So when the problem is a contract, a compliance exposure, a performance file or a regulator, you don't get a coach's version of it. You get someone who can read the legal reality and the political one at the same time and tell you which is actually driving your decision.
Then I ran the enterprise. Chief Legal Officer. Chief Administrative Officer, covering HR, finance, IT and business development. Chief Operating Officer. CEO of a group with housing and development companies under it. City Manager more than once. Organizations from one person to eleven thousand. Your problem rarely sits in one function, and neither did mine.
I did it in public. Council chambers, press, union negotiations, political principals. Getting it wrong wasn't a bad quarter, it was in the paper the next morning. Nothing you bring me is going to land as a shock.
And I did it as the outsider every time. Youngest in the room. Usually the only woman at the table. Foreign, wrong accent, none of the cultural shorthand everyone else had. Authority was never handed to me anywhere, so I had to build it from nothing, in five countries, more than once.
Building authority in a room that didn't hand it to you is most of what we work on. theory. In the rooms you're actually walking into.
This isn't about fixing something. It's about closing the gap between the job you're doing and how the room is reading you, before it costs you again.
WHAT YOU BRING ME.
The board or the executive committee. What you're walking into, where it goes sideways, what you say when the question you didn't prepare for lands. Then afterwards, what actually happened in that room and what to do before Monday.
The mandate you were handed without the authority, the budget or the people to deliver it. What to escalate, what to put in writing, and which conversation actually moves it.
The risk you can see coming. When to raise it, who hears it first, what goes on the record, and how to do all of that without becoming the story yourself.
The restructure. Who gets told before the announcement and who finds out in the meeting. Which changes hold and which get reversed by Christmas.
The people decisions. The person who has to go. The one you can't afford to lose. The direct report whose scope doesn't cover the work that's eating your week.
The case for scope, a team or a band, built as a business argument rather than a personal one.
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The promotion nobody will give you a straight answer about. What the people deciding actually need to see, and why your current evidence isn't giving it to them.
And the one underneath most of it. Stay, push, wait, escalate or leave.
YOU LEAVE KNOWING WHAT YOU'RE GOING TO DO.
Decisions made once, with reasoning behind them you can defend.
Authority that matches what you're accountable for.
Risk raised early, in the right order, at no cost to your standing.
A restructure that holds past the first quarter.
Senior rooms where you're operating at the right altitude.
A case for scope or compensation that gets escalated rather than parked.
Judgment that's visible to the people deciding what happens next.
And the thing under all of it. You stop guessing about what's actually going on around you.
THINGS AT YOUR LEVEL DON'T ARRIVE ON SCHEDULE.
The board paper lands Friday for Monday. The regulator calls. Someone resigns in a way that changes the whole conversation.
So you get me between sessions, not just in them. You send a message on a Thursday afternoon and I answer that afternoon, not at the next scheduled slot. Before the board meeting we go through what you're walking into and where it's likely to go sideways. After it, we look at what actually happened in the room and what to do about it before Monday.
Six or twelve months. Sessions every two weeks, virtual or hybrid. Every session is with me. No associates, no handoffs.
I take very few clients, because that's the only way this works. When something lands, I already know your situation, your CEO, and the two people on your leadership team who make it complicated. Nothing has to be explained from the beginning.
Assessments where they add precision. Never as a standalone exercise.
WHO I WORK WITH.
Managing Directors. General Counsels. COOs. Chiefs of Staff. Senior leaders on the VP track. Founders running companies they built.
People handling expanded scope, political complexity, public visibility, or a mandate that arrived without the authority to deliver it.
They don't come to me because things are falling apart. They come because something is in front of them that they only get to get wrong once.
INVESTMENT
Six-month engagement from $18,000. Twelve-month quoted separately.
Some clients pay privately. Some are funded by their organization. The work is the same either way.
Final pricing reflects the length, the access and the situation. Quoted privately after the first conversation.
Ulrika Gustafson Advisory
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