Leadership is not a title.
It is what happens when the room is hard, the answer is unclear, and people are watching to see what you do next. That skill is coachable. It is also, almost always, coached by someone who has never actually had to do it.
Two things that rarely appear together.
Google Executive Coach
Trained and practicing in one of the most demanding executive coaching environments in the world — where performance is measured, feedback is direct, and nobody has time for platitudes.
Thirty years leading a public institution
Where the people you lead cannot be fired, poached, or re-orged. They have to be actually led — in public, under a board, with the microphone on.
Silicon Valley coaches have never been accountable to a school board. Education leaders have never coached at Google. That combination is the reason people choose this practice.
Executive Coaching
Confidential, one-to-one coaching for leaders carrying more than they can say out loud. Two tracks, depending on where you are.
The Superintendency Track
For aspiring superintendents and rising school executives. You are being evaluated for a job nobody has taught you how to do. The interview is a performance. The first year is a minefield. Most people navigate both alone, and it shows.
- Positioning and preparation for the superintendency search — cabinet, board, and community
- The first hundred days: what to change, what to leave alone, and what will get you fired
- Board relationships — the skill that ends more superintendencies than any other
- Executive presence in public meetings, where the stakes are real and the recording is permanent
- Building an AI and technology posture before someone else builds one for you
Executive Coaching
For sitting superintendents, cabinet-level leaders, and business executives. You are already in the chair. The question is no longer whether you can do the job — it is whether you can keep doing it at this intensity without losing the thing that made you good at it.
- Decision-making under public scrutiny and incomplete information
- Managing a team you did not build, or a board you did not choose
- Difficult conversations you have been postponing — and the cost of postponing them
- Leading through AI and technology change without abdicating judgment to it
- Sustaining a career that does not consume the person living it
What coaching costs
Three shapes, depending on how you want to work. Most people start hourly and move to a retainer once they realize they want the conversation every week, not every crisis.
| Engagement | What you get | Investment |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly | Session by session. No commitment. Good for a specific decision, a board presentation, or an interview you cannot afford to lose. | $250 / hour |
| Executive Coaching Access | Up to eight hours a month — typically a standing weekly session, plus access between sessions when something breaks and you need a read before you respond. Month-to-month. | $1,500 / month |
| Executive Elevation Partnership | Everything in Access, plus a leadership assessment, a personalized development plan, stakeholder alignment sessions, and priority scheduling. Built for a superintendency search, a first hundred days, or a transformation you cannot afford to get wrong. Six-month minimum. | $2,500 / month |
Most leaders start with Access and move to the Partnership once the work in front of them needs more than a standing hour — a search, a launch, a board transition. Coaching delivered only in emergencies produces insight and no change; a standing weekly session is what actually moves a leader.
The Performance Sprint
You did not hire weak people. Every person on your leadership team is individually excellent. And the team, together, is slower than the sum of its parts — and everyone has quietly stopped saying so out loud.
Executive teams rarely fail on capability. They fail on alignment.
The Performance Sprint is a ten-week engagement that diagnoses where an executive team is actually fracturing — decision rights, unspoken conflict, competing definitions of success, or an operating rhythm nobody ever designed — and then repairs it in the room, with the team present.
This is not a retreat. Retreats produce a good feeling and a poster. This produces named decision rights, a written operating rhythm, and a set of agreements the team has to live with on Monday.
Built on the Leader Elevation Framework™ — Dr. Adams's tiered methodology for moving leaders from competence to alignment to elevation.
What you get
| Deliverable | Format | When |
|---|---|---|
| Team Diagnostic | Confidential 1:1 interviews with every member of the leadership team, plus a synthesis nobody has been willing to say out loud | Weeks 1–2 |
| Findings Session | Dr. Adams delivers the diagnostic to the team, together. This session is the intervention. | Week 3 |
| Decision Rights Map | Who decides, who is consulted, who is informed — written down for the decisions that actually matter | Week 5 |
| Operating Rhythm | Meeting architecture, escalation paths, and review cadence. Designed, not inherited. | Week 6 |
| Executive Coaching | Four 1:1 sessions with the senior leader; two with each direct report | Weeks 3–10 |
| Team Agreements | What this team commits to, in writing, signed by the people in the room | Week 8 |
| 60-Day Check | Return session. What held, what slipped, what gets corrected. | Post-close |
Who this is for
- Executive cabinets and senior leadership teams of 6–12 people
- New leaders inheriting a team they did not build
- Organizations post-merger, post-restructure, or post-crisis
- Teams where the strategy is right and the execution keeps failing
Who this is not for
- Leaders who want the consultant to fix one specific person. If that is the actual problem, this is not the engagement — it is a conversation you are ready to have directly, and we are glad to help you prepare for it.
- Teams whose senior leader is not yet ready to be coached in front of the people they lead. That is a real and common constraint. When the timing changes, so can this.
- Organizations looking for team-building activities. There are no trust falls here.
Ten weeks. The uncomfortable part is week three.
Listen to everyone, separately
Confidential interviews with every leader. What emerges is almost never what the senior leader thought the problem was. It is usually something everybody knows and nobody has permission to name.
Say it in the room
The findings session. Delivered to the whole team, with the senior leader present and accountable. This is the session that changes the engagement from a project into a turning point — and it is the one people remember years later.
Rebuild the machinery
Decision rights. Operating rhythm. Team agreements. Concurrent 1:1 coaching so individual leaders can actually execute what the team agreed to.
Make it hold
Close-out, then a return session sixty days later. Most consulting engagements end before you find out whether they worked. This one comes back to check.
What it costs
Team Sprint
$15,000 Up to 12 leaders · 10 weeks · 60-day check includedFull diagnostic, findings session, decision rights, operating rhythm, and the coaching that makes them stick.
Executive Elevation Partnership
$2,500 Per executive · per month · 6-month minimumAssessment, development plan, stakeholder alignment, and priority access for the senior leader or a designated successor. Available standalone or as a continuation of the sprint — see Executive Coaching above.
Teams larger than twelve are scoped separately. The sprint depends on Dr. Adams knowing every person in the room — that does not scale past a certain number, and we will not pretend it does.
Thirty years of leading real organizations through real change — where the team you have is the team you have, and the results are public.
Leadership · A Practice Area of Dr. Adams Global™Elevation is not motivation. Motivation lasts a week. Elevation is what happens when a team's decision rights, rhythm, and agreements finally match its ambition.
Let’s talk.
Tell us about your team. You will receive a scoped proposal within one business day.
Prefer to talk first? Schedule a strategy session.