Ethical & Practical Concerns in Executive Coaching
A Personal Story
Rebecca, a founding member of Mind University, worked as the International Outreach Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation for twelve Years in the 1990s and early 2000s. One day, after delivering a public lecture on Campbell's famous theory of "The Hero's Journey" she was approached by a corporate executive who had attended the lecture and asked eagerly about the possibility of her coming to do some organizational work with his employees.
Rebecca replied, 'I'm not sure if you know what you're asking me to do. If you've understood the nature of the lecture I gave today, you will know that encouraging someone to follow a hero's journey will inevitably bring them into conflict with anyone who is trying to impose their own journey or goals on to that individual. In fact, if I did my work well and honestly at your company, I predict that half of your employees would turn in resignation letters by the end of the week. Do you really want to pursue this?'
The executive stared at Rebecca, open-mouthed and incredulous and then, without another word, turned on his heel and left.
This little anecdote is significant because it highlights who the stakeholders actually are in Executive Coaching and what level of clarity is required from all parties before entering into any coaching arrangement. In many coaching situations it is not the “coachee” who is directly paying the coach, but rather the organization. Our capitalist lens tells us that whoever pays the piper gets to call the tune, but that does not hold in this situation. The boss may be the buyer, but this does not mean that the organization has the right to exclusively decide what the goals of the Executive Coaching should be. We are talking about individual employees with the full set of rights and responsibilities, and among those rights are the right to be free of coercion and the right to pursue happiness as they understand it.
Too often businesses speak a good line, but when the rubber hits the road they are all too willing to exploit employees in order to boost short-term productivity at the expense of that employee's mental, emotional, and even physical well-being. To do Executive Coaching ethically one of the ground rules is that the well-being of the whole person must be taken into account. If the company demands certain immediate, measurable increase in productivity as a sign of effectiveness in coaching, this should be a red flag that you are entering dangerous terrain and should refuse to engage with that company.
The reports of a spike in job dissatisfaction and life dissatisfaction after short-term Executive Coaching is simply a sign that conversations with an outside person, i.e. the coach, have raised the employee’s level of awareness of an existing problem; probably a misalignment between the employee’s skill set and job description, or between the amount of resources and authority that have been provided by the company and the kind of results that are being demanded. No amount of coaching can turn a sow's ear into a silk purse or get blood out of a stone.
The true efficacy and reward of Executive Coaching comes only after a long and successful engagement between coach and coachee, where the depth of self-awareness, the correction of cognitive biases, the strengthening of emotional intelligence, and the practicing of long-term changes in communication and behavior will result in genuine improvements leading to greater mastery and leadership. That is why it is essential that the company sees Executive Coaching as a long-term proposition and is willing to do the necessary support of the employee’s engagement in being coached, so that both the employee and the company reap the rewards of this investment in time, energy, and money.
The Ethics of Coaching for Compliance:
When Personal Development Becomes Organizational Coercion
Rebecca's Refusal: A Parable of Authentic Development
When Rebecca, then International Outreach Director for the Joseph Campbell Foundation, declined a lucrative corporate consulting opportunity in the early 2000s, she articulated a fundamental ethical tension that continues to plague executive coaching today. Having just delivered a lecture on Campbell's "Hero's Journey" - the archetypal narrative of an individual's struggle toward authentic self-realization - she recognized immediately that the corporate executive approaching her had fundamentally misunderstood what such a journey entails.
"If I did my work well and honestly at your company," Rebecca warned, "I can predict that half of your employees would turn in resignation letters by the end of the week." Her prediction was not hyperbolic but prophetic. Authentic personal development inevitably brings individuals into conflict with systems that demand conformity. The executive's open-mouthed incredulity and abrupt departure revealed the uncomfortable truth: he wanted the language and prestige of transformational development without its actual consequences.
This encounter illuminates the central ethical dilemma in executive coaching: whose interests does the coaching serve, and what happens when organizational demands conflict with individual flourishing? Recent research suggests that far from being a theoretical concern, this tension produces measurable harm—with studies documenting that 57-90% of coaching engagements produce negative side effects, including decreased job satisfaction, decreased life satisfaction, increased stress, and damaged workplace relationships.
The Dual Client Problem: Serving Two Masters
Executive coaching operates under a structural contradiction. Unlike therapy, where the client pays and defines success, or like friendship, where mutual benefit creates the relationship, executive coaching typically involves three parties with potentially conflicting interests: the individual being coached, the coach providing services, and the organization paying the bills.
As Stokes and Jolly observe in their comprehensive review, "the executive coach's client relationship is inevitably twofold, comprising both the individual in the coaching session and the organization that provides that individual with their executive authority." This creates an ethical minefield where coaches must constantly navigate competing loyalties.
The research literature distinguishes between two fundamentally different coaching approaches: coaching focused on the "Positive Emotional Attractor"—helping people make progress on their own intentional efforts toward desired change—versus coaching to the "Negative Emotional Attractor," described as efforts to "encourage, force, or persuade people to change in a way desired by others." This latter approach, termed "coaching for compliance," neuroscience research reveals, activates entirely different neural networks, ones associated with threat response rather than learning and growth.
When organizations hire coaches with implicit or explicit expectations that coaching will make executives more productive, more compliant, or more effective at extracting performance from subordinates, they are purchasing coaching for compliance—a sophisticated form of behavior modification that may directly conflict with the coachee's authentic development and wellbeing.
The Evidence of Harm: When Coaching Decreases Life Satisfaction
Rebecca's prediction about resignation letters finds empirical support in recent systematic research on negative coaching outcomes. German researchers Schermuly, Graßmann, and colleagues conducted groundbreaking studies documenting the frequency and nature of coaching's negative effects—research that challenges the field's overwhelmingly positive self-representation.
In studies of over 250 coaches and clients, they found that 68% of clients reported experiencing negative side effects from coaching. The most common negative outcomes were particularly revealing: decreased job satisfaction (the most frequent complaint) and decreased life satisfaction. Additional harms included increased stress, impaired sleep, damaged relationships with colleagues, and heightened feelings of inadequacy or self-doubt.
Remarkably, these negative effects were inversely correlated with coaching relationship quality and coach expertise—suggesting that poor coaching was more harmful, but that even good coaching frequently produced these effects. Most tellingly, one study found that a single coaching session significantly reduced clients' life satisfaction, a finding the researchers themselves found surprising and concerning.
What explains these paradoxical outcomes? Rebecca's framework provides insight: "The reports of a spike in job dissatisfaction and life dissatisfaction after short-term executive coaching is simply a sign that conversations with an outside person, i.e., the coach, have raised the level of awareness of an existing problem." Good coaching may actually increase dissatisfaction by helping people recognize misalignments between their values and organizational demands, between available resources and expected results, or between their authentic aspirations and their current trajectory.
As Rebecca notes, this awareness often reveals "a misalignment between the employee's skill set and job description, or between the amount of resources and authority that have been provided by the company and the kind of results that are being demanded." The coaching hasn't created the problem—it has merely made an existing dysfunction visible. The question then becomes: what happens next?
The False Promise of Quick Fixes: Productivity Pressure and Moral Injury
Organizations often approach executive coaching with what Rebecca identifies as a dangerous expectation: "immediate, measurable increase in productivity as a sign of effectiveness in coaching." This demand represents a fundamental misunderstanding of human development and creates conditions for what can only be described as institutional coercion.
The research documents multiple cases where coaching interventions failed or produced worse outcomes than no intervention at all. In one hospital study, leadership coaching was part of an organizational development initiative that "failed with better results recorded for the no-intervention control group." The researchers identified that employees lacked time for development activities, leaders never took genuine ownership of the process, and the intervention was essentially imposed rather than authentically supported.
Most troubling from an ethical standpoint, another study found that after 10-12 coaching sessions, the intervention group performed worse on manager-rated task performance than a control group. While methodological questions complicate interpretation, the finding suggests coaching can harm performance when it serves organizational control rather than genuine development.
These failures reflect what happens when coaching tries to make unsustainable systems work rather than questioning those systems' fundamental premises. As Rebecca observes with characteristic directness: "No amount of coaching can turn a sow's ear into a silk purse or get blood out of a stone." Yet organizations routinely hire coaches expecting exactly this—to extract higher performance from people already stretched beyond sustainable limits, operating with insufficient resources, or trapped in roles misaligned with their capabilities.
The harm extends beyond the immediate coachee. When coaching helps a manager become more effective at implementing exploitative practices—squeezing more productivity from subordinates, enforcing unrealistic expectations, or rationalizing toxic organizational cultures—it creates what Rebecca's framework helps us recognize as moral injury. The coached executive may become more skilled at extracting performance while experiencing growing internal conflict about the human cost of their effectiveness. They develop the competence to implement practices they find ethically questionable, coached into effectiveness at activities that violate their values.
The Hero's Journey and Organizational Demands: An Irreconcilable Conflict?
Campbell's Hero's Journey framework illuminates why authentic development and organizational compliance often conflict fundamentally. The hero's journey begins with a "call to adventure"—an invitation to leave the familiar world and discover one's true nature and purpose. The journey requires refusing the false helper who offers to spare the hero difficulty, and instead facing trials that test character, descending into the metaphorical underworld of self-confrontation, and ultimately returning transformed with wisdom to share.
This archetypal pattern describes genuine human development: leaving behind inherited assumptions, facing difficult truths about oneself and one's world, integrating shadow aspects of personality, and emerging with authentic self-knowledge and purpose. But such a journey inherently threatens institutional stability. Organizations depend on predictability, conformity to established norms, subordination of individual judgment to collective goals, and acceptance of existing power structures.
Rebecca's insight was recognizing that someone truly embarked on a hero's journey would inevitably question whether their organizational role aligned with their authentic calling. They would refuse to subordinate their values to institutional demands. They would see through convenient rationalizations for exploitative practices. They would choose integrity over advancement if the two conflicted. Many would indeed conclude, as Rebecca predicted, that their path lay elsewhere—hence the resignation letters.
This explains why the executive retreated so rapidly. He wanted the language of transformation—the prestige of offering employees a "hero's journey"—without its actual implications. He wanted people to be more engaged, more motivated, more effective, but still fundamentally compliant with organizational objectives whether those objectives served human flourishing or not.
Ethical Coaching: Rebecca's Framework for Authentic Practice
Rebecca articulates several essential principles for ethical executive coaching that directly address the compliance problem:
First, clarify stakeholders and authority from the outset. "This little anecdote is significant because it highlights who the stakeholders are in executive coaching and what clarity is required from all parties before entering into any arrangement." Ethical coaching requires explicit contracting about whose interests the coaching serves, what happens when interests conflict, and where the coach's ultimate loyalty lies.
While organizations pay coaching fees, Rebecca insists this "does not mean that the organization has the right to exclusively decide what the goals of the executive coaching should be." The coachee retains fundamental rights—"the right to be free of coercion and the right to pursue happiness as they understand it." Any coaching arrangement that compromises these rights fails ethically regardless of organizational benefit.
Second, recognize productivity pressure as a red flag indicating dangerous terrain. "If the company demands certain immediate, measurable increase in productivity as a sign of effectiveness in coaching, this should be a red flag that you are entering dangerous terrain and should refuse to engage with that company." This principle requires coaches to decline lucrative contracts when organizations approach coaching as behavior modification rather than genuine development.
The research supports Rebecca's caution. Studies showing increased stress, decreased satisfaction, and worse performance often involved short-term interventions with productivity-focused goals. The harm arose not from coaching per se but from coaching deployed as a tool of organizational control, attempting to extract more from people already operating at unsustainable levels.
Third, prioritize the whole person over organizational metrics. "To do executive coaching ethically one of the ground rules is that the well-being of the whole person must be taken into account." This principle directly challenges the common practice of defining coaching success purely through organizational outcome measures—productivity increases, 360-degree feedback improvements, or performance ratings.
Rebecca's framework suggests that coaches must be willing to support conclusions that disadvantage organizational interests—including helping someone recognize a role isn't right for them, identifying systemic problems the organization refuses to address, or supporting someone's decision to leave rather than continue tolerating unsustainable conditions. A coach unwilling to reach these conclusions when appropriate has already subordinated the coachee's wellbeing to organizational convenience.
Fourth, embrace long-term engagement as the only ethical approach. "The true efficacy and reward of executive coaching comes only after a long and successful engagement between coach and coachee, where the depth of self-awareness, the correction of cognitive biases, the strengthening of emotional intelligence, and the practicing of long-term changes in communication and behavior will result in genuine improvements leading to greater mastery and leadership."
This principle recognizes that authentic development cannot be rushed and that organizations must provide genuine support—including reasonable workloads, resources adequate to expectations, and patience for gradual transformation. Short-term engagements focused on quick productivity gains inevitably devolve into coaching for compliance because there's insufficient time for deeper work.
The Path Forward: Coaching as Genuine Development
The research suggests that coaching's ethical future depends on the field collectively embracing Rebecca's framework: coaching must serve authentic human development even when this conflicts with immediate organizational interests. This requires:
Honest contracting that acknowledges potential conflicts and clarifies that coaching success includes outcomes like "recognizing this role isn't right for you" or "identifying systemic problems the organization must address."
Refusal of compliance-focused engagements where organizations seek behavior modification rather than genuine development, signaled by productivity pressure, short timelines, or unwillingness to support systemic changes coaching might reveal necessary.
Commitment to long-term relationships that allow time for depth work, recognition that early increased dissatisfaction often signals authentic progress, and patience for sustainable change rather than forced quick fixes.
Whole-person focus that refuses to sacrifice individual wellbeing for organizational metrics and recognizes that people's fundamental rights—freedom from coercion and pursuit of happiness—supersede organizational convenience.
Rebecca's refusal of that corporate executive's offer two decades ago models the courage ethical coaching requires: the willingness to decline lucrative work when it would compromise authentic development, the honesty to articulate difficult truths about what genuine transformation entails, and the integrity to choose human flourishing over institutional profit when the two conflict.
The alternative - coaching for compliance dressed in the language of development - produces the documented harms: decreased satisfaction, increased stress, moral injury, and ultimately the corruption of coaching itself into a sophisticated tool of organizational control. Authentic development cannot be domesticated to serve institutional convenience without betraying its fundamental nature. Ethical coaching cannot honestly serve both masters: it must choose.