The CEO Who Came for Coaching and Needed Something Else

He arrived with a very clear brief. He wanted to work on his communication style, his board relationships, his strategic decision-making. Coaching language. Clean, containable, professional. We spent the first session exactly there.

By the third session, something else was in the room.

He described how his leadership team looked at him. The assumption in their eyes that he had the answer before the question was finished. The way decisions travelled upward to him not because he was necessarily best placed to make them, but because he was the CEO and that was where decisions were supposed to go. He had learned to wear this. He had become good at it. But in the evenings, alone, there was something he had never said to anyone: he felt like a child in an adult’s suit. The shoes were too big. He had always felt this way, and he had always performed well enough that nobody noticed.

That is not a coaching problem. That is an analysis problem. And the two are not the same thing.

Organisations Are Not Machines

I trained as an executive coach at ESSEC — one of Europe’s leading business schools, consistently ranked in the top ten by the Financial Times. What ESSEC teaches is rigorous and genuinely valuable. I use it. But what 25 years of sitting with people — executives, founders, CEOs, board members — has taught me is something no business school teaches, because business schools are not in the business of the unconscious.

Organisations are not machines. They are not rational systems that produce irrational outputs when the inputs are wrong. They are entities. They have one primary goal — survival — and everything, consciously or not, organises itself around that goal. Like any entity that wants to survive, they develop internal conflicts, jealousies, envies. Between departments competing for resource and recognition. Between the version of the organisation that leadership says it is and the version that actually shows up every day.

You can read an organisation the way you read a person. I do this regularly. And what you find is often startling.

The Organisation With an Eating Disorder

Some organisations try to grow by absorbing other organisations. Acquisition after acquisition, expansion that feels like appetite rather than strategy. They consume before they have digested the last thing they consumed. They find themselves in trouble — not because the acquisitions were wrong on paper, but because the organisation did not have the metabolic capacity to absorb them. The growth becomes fragmentation. The fragmentation becomes crisis.

That is an organisational eating disorder. The same compulsion, the same inability to stop, the same consequences.

Other organisations become addicted to process. To bureaucracy. To the comfort of doing things the way they were always done. The meetings multiply. The approval chains lengthen. Innovation gets stuck in review. The organisation is not corrupt or lazy — it is rigid in the way that any addicted system becomes rigid, organising itself around the repetition of familiar behaviour rather than the risk of something new. The addiction to procedure is a defence against uncertainty, and uncertainty is exactly what organisations in changing markets cannot afford to avoid.

The Shadow of Management

Jung described the shadow as everything a person cannot see in themselves — the parts that have been disowned, repressed, or simply never examined. It does not disappear. It goes underground and operates from there, shaping behaviour in ways the conscious mind does not recognise or claim.

Organisations have shadows too. The culture of an organisation — how people actually behave, what is actually rewarded, what is actually tolerated, what nobody says in the meeting but everyone knows — is the shadow of management’s conscious decisions. Leadership sets the strategy, the values, the stated priorities. The shadow runs everything underneath. The two are almost never identical. The gap between them is where most organisational dysfunction lives.

A consultant can map that gap. An executive coach can name it. Neither can go into it the way depth psychology can, because depth psychology is the discipline built specifically for what operates below the surface of conscious intention.

The Impostor in the Corner Office

Back to the CEO.

What he was describing is one of the most common presentations I encounter in senior executives — and one of the most consistently unaddressed. The staff project onto the CEO an omniscience he does not have and cannot have. He knows the answers. He sees around corners. He is the leader, therefore he leads, therefore he must know. This projection is not malicious. It is structural. It is what organisations do to the person at the top.

The adult in the CEO identifies with this projection. He has to — the organisation needs it from him, and he has built his career on meeting what is needed. But the child inside knows something different. The child knows the shoes are too big. The child has always known this, through every promotion, every success, every title. Impostor syndrome is not fraudulence. It is the gap between the persona the system has built around you and the inner experience of the person carrying it.

Coaching can sharpen communication. It can improve decision-making frameworks. It can build specific leadership capacities. What it cannot do is reach the child in the corner office. That requires something slower, deeper, and more honest.

What This Work Actually Looks Like

I work with executives both as a coach and as an analyst. Sometimes the work is genuinely coaching — strategic, focused, skills-oriented. Often it becomes something else as the real question emerges from underneath the presenting one. I hold both. The ESSEC training gives me the business rigour. The Jungian analysis gives me the depth. The 25 years in the room with people running things gives me the pattern recognition to know which is needed and when.

The organisations I have worked with that changed — not just improved their metrics, but actually changed — were the ones where the leadership was willing to look at what was running underneath. The shadow. The addiction to the familiar. The unspoken contracts that were consuming energy and preventing growth.

That is available. It is not comfortable. But it is what makes the difference between an organisation that survives and one that transforms.

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Dr. Philippe Jacquet is an executive coach trained at ESSEC Business School and a Jungian analyst with over 25 years of clinical and coaching practice at Harley Street, London. He works with senior executives, CEOs and leadership teams in English and French, in person and by secure video. His coaching draws on both business school rigour and depth psychological practice — a combination built specifically for the problems that standard coaching cannot reach.