A slide deck is a pack of slides. Some of that work is real. Little of it is coaching. If you need a team to diagnose a market and hand you a plan, hire that team. Do not rent a coach and hope the pack appears.
Transformation is a word that has been asked to do too much. It now covers a town hall, a new org chart, and a hope that behaviour will follow. I have sat on the other side of those tables as a CEO. Coaching at Hanover Executive is one leader, one coach, and a written stretch of work in Berlin.
Mixing contracts without naming them
Mentoring says “I walked this path.” Advising says “choose A.” Coaching stays with the leader’s own call. You can want all three. You cannot have all three in the same hour unless you name which hat you are wearing. Mixing them without naming them wastes the hour and then both people argue about what was bought.
I will not draft your board script. I will not sit in the meeting. I will not publish a before-and-after valuation. Those are other trades. A consultant can ship a plan. A communications firm can ship a narrative. A coach stays with judgement when the pack is already too long. If you want the pack, say so and hire the pack.
Hanover Executive will not run a team offsite and call it coaching. Offsites can be useful. They are a different product. Guaranteed promotion, retention, or a number a sponsor already wants are also a different product.
| Work | Who should do it | What Hanover will not do |
|---|---|---|
| Diagnose a market and ship a plan | A consulting team | Pretend coaching produced the pack |
| Write the board script | A communications firm, or you | Draft slides or sit in the corridor |
| Hold the leader’s judgement | One-to-one coaching | Publish a valuation |
| Run a team offsite | A facilitator, named as such | Sell the offsite as coaching |
I have bought consulting and lived with the decks. Those years are not a gallery of transformations Hanover now claims. I will not sell you a thinner version of a trade I already know.
What “done” looks like
Done is the thing named in the brief: the leader can hold the conversation they could not hold, or they cannot. That is a checkable sentence. “We transformed the culture” is not. Culture work that cannot name an end date is usually afraid to be checked. Put a review on the calendar.
A useful series in Berlin has three lines in writing before session two: the change, the cadence, the stop-or-renew date. If your first instinct is to attach a pack to the enquiry, pause. That instinct is the consulting brief trying to enter through the coaching door.
Ask for coaching without smuggling a pack
Name the conversation you cannot yet hold. Name the cadence you can keep. Leave the appendix at home. If the work is actually a transformation programme, you already know the vendors for that. Use them. If the work is one leader and a defined stretch, get in touch with the role and the kind of conversation.
I will not keep a secret second contract in which I “also help with the slides.” The hour is unused by anyone else because it is unused by anyone else. Fill it with a pack and you have bought a cheaper consultant with worse production values. Say the word coaching only when you mean the leader’s call, not the appendix.