Executive writing coaching

What executive writing coaching is

Executive writing coaching is a short, private session, usually thirty to forty minutes every second week, with one person whose writing is read as the company speaking. We work on a document you have to send anyway: the all-staff email about the restructure, the note to the board, the letter to a customer who is threatening to leave, the announcement of a price rise. You write it, I read it before we meet, and we rebuild it together on the call.

It is not ghostwriting and it is not a speaking course. Nothing is written for you and nothing is delivered under your name by somebody else. The measure of whether it worked is that in four months you are sending the difficult emails on the first draft, in your own words, without asking anybody to check them.

Who this is for

An owner, a managing director or the one senior person whose writing is the company’s public face. Usually they can speak perfectly well and write badly, or write well in a comfortable register and stiffen up the moment the subject is money, bad news or a decision people will dislike. The common failure is not grammar. It is hedging: three paragraphs of context before the decision, so the reader has to guess and half of them guess wrong.

The important distinction is against executive voice development, which sounds similar and is the opposite arrangement. That service captures how you speak and writes it up as a profile so that a ghostwriter can sound like you; you end up writing less. This one teaches you to write it yourself. Buy voice development if you intend to hand the writing to somebody else and want it to sound like you. Buy coaching if the writing has to be yours and you want to stop dreading it. Buying both is reasonable, in that order, but most people need only one.

You do not need this if what you want is articles with your name on them appearing regularly. That is ghostwriting, it costs less of your time, and it is honest work.

What goes in it

• Real documents only. You send whatever is genuinely in your drafts folder. If there is nothing that fortnight, we take something you sent last month and look at what it caused.
• The decision first. Most of the work is moving the actual point to the opening sentence and cutting the throat-clearing above it. This is the single change that alters how a whole organisation reads you.
• Difficult registers. Saying no, delivering bad news without softening it into ambiguity, apologising without admitting things you did not do, and writing to somebody more senior than you without becoming smaller on the page.
• Your own patterns, named. By the third session I can tell you the four habits that cost you most, in your writing specifically. Most people have four, and they are the same four every time they write.
• Confidentiality as standard. Board material, staff matters and commercial terms come up constantly. Nothing said or sent leaves the session, and nothing is used as an example anywhere, including on this site.

What you get

The documents themselves, sent. Because the sessions run on live drafts, the immediate output is the email or the note going out better than it would have. That starts in the first fortnight.

A one-page sheet of your four habits. Written in the third month, once the pattern is clear: the four things you do, what each costs the reader, and the replacement for each. Yours alone; it is not circulated.

A small set of your own openings. Five or six first paragraphs you wrote, kept as models, so the next difficult email starts from something rather than from nothing.

An end. When the drafts arriving need no structural change for three sessions running, I say so and we stop. Coaching that never finishes is not coaching.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. The managing director of a forty-person Canadian print and signage firm writes every all-staff email, the quarterly note to the two outside shareholders, and the letters to the four accounts that make up most of the revenue. He is fluent in a room and dense on paper. His last restructure email ran nine hundred words, reached the actual change in the sixth paragraph, and generated a fortnight of corridor rumour that a second email had to correct.

The first session takes a live draft announcing a price increase and cuts it from six hundred words to two hundred and ten, with the increase, the date and the reason in the first three sentences and the apology removed entirely, because there was nothing to apologise for. The second session names habit one: he opens every difficult message with the history of how the decision was reached, which reads as justification. Over four months he writes eleven of these unaided. The shareholder note goes from four drafts to one. In month five the sessions go monthly, and in month six they stop.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Just the two of us. What you have to write, what you avoid writing, and what happened last time something landed badly. No charge, and nothing from it is recorded.
2. A fixed price in writing. The monthly figure and the number of sessions and documents covered, agreed before the first one.
3. The first session. A live document, read by me beforehand, rebuilt on the call.
4. The rhythm. Thirty to forty minutes every second week, plus short written notes on anything you send between sessions, returned within one working day because these documents rarely wait.
5. Stepping down. Fortnightly to monthly to finished, called by me, usually inside six months.

What it costs

The pricing page shows the published band for coaching one in-house person: $500 to $1,200 CAD per month, fixed and agreed in writing. Where you sit depends on how many documents come to me between sessions and whether the sessions are weekly at the start. There is no minimum term beyond the first two months. No report goes to anybody else, because in this case the person being coached is the person paying.

What happens next

Some people finish and then decide the volume is too much to write personally after all, and move the longer pieces to somebody writing under their name, keeping only the short and sensitive things for themselves. Some want the internal messages handled as a standing job, which is staff communications written properly. And where the same faults turn up in everything the company publishes, not just in one person’s emails, the team version of this is the wider fix. None of it is assumed, and the coaching is a complete piece of work that is supposed to end.