Impact Coaching for Googlers

Make useful progress on the leadership challenge that is already in front of you

If you are a Google employee with Hall Pass funding available, you may be able to use it towards individual executive coaching.

I work with professionals and leaders on practical, live challenges at work: stepping into a bigger role, managing people for the first time, influencing difficult stakeholders, responding to feedback, increasing executive presence, navigating organisational politics, or simply becoming more effective in a role that has become more demanding.

The work is confidential, individual and built around your situation.

If your Hall Pass allowance needs to be used before the end of the year, this can also be a good time to turn an available development benefit into work that has immediate practical value.

What could we work on?

You do not need to arrive with a perfectly defined coaching objective. Often people come because something at work is not working quite as well as they would like, or because their role has changed and what worked before is no longer enough. Typical areas include:

• Moving from peer or individual contributor to manager
• Leading former peers or a newly inherited team
• Managing a difficult employee or giving more consequential feedback
• Building influence without formal authority
• Handling complex cross-functional relationships
• Working more effectively with senior stakeholders
• Managing conflict without becoming either passive or unnecessarily confrontational
• Strengthening executive presence and communication
• Responding constructively to 360, performance or stakeholder feedback
• Becoming more politically and organisationally effective
• Preparing for a promotion or a substantially larger role
• Managing the pressure, ambiguity and competing demands of a regional or global job
• Thinking through an important career or leadership decision

Sometimes the immediate issue is quite specific. The coaching may begin there and reveal a larger question underneath it. That is part of the work.

Practical coaching, not just conversation

My approach is deliberately practical. We begin by establishing what you actually want to achieve and by when. We then work with the real situations you are facing rather than talking about leadership in the abstract.

Depending on your objective, our work may include analysing a stakeholder situation, preparing for an important conversation, rehearsing how you will handle it, role-playing difficult interactions, reviewing feedback, examining how you are perceived, working on executive communication, or designing a specific experiment to try at work.

Then you do the work in the real environment. We review what happened, what you learned and what you should do differently next time.

I will support you, but I will also challenge you. Part of the value of having an independent coach is having someone who can ask the questions that colleagues may avoid asking and tell you what they genuinely see.

Coaching shaped around your objectives

There is no standard curriculum that every client works through. Your objectives determine the work. We normally begin by answering two questions:

What do you want to achieve through the coaching?

By when?

We turn that into a concise objective and identify practical signs that will tell us whether you are making progress. As the work develops, we can change the emphasis if the evidence suggests that something different would be more useful.

Flexible sessions

Coaching can take place:

Online

• 30-minute Zoom consultation
• 60-minute Zoom consultation

Face-to-face in Singapore

• 60-minute consultation
• 90-minute consultation

Online and face-to-face coaching can be mixed. There is no need to use the hours at a fixed frequency. We can meet more frequently when you are working through something immediate and leave longer gaps when you need time to practise and test new approaches.

Using Google Hall Pass

Some Google employees are able to use Hall Pass towards external professional development such as coaching. Eligibility, available balances, reimbursement levels and deadlines are determined by Google, so you should check the current Hall Pass rules that apply to you before committing. I can provide the supporting materials you may need for your internal approval or reimbursement process. If you have unused Hall Pass funding available for 2026, it may therefore be worth exploring whether coaching is an appropriate way to use it.

Start with a confidential conversation

You do not need to decide in advance whether coaching is right for you. The first step is a free, confidential conversation in which we can discuss:

• what is happening;
• what you would like to change;
• whether I am the right person to help; and
• what working together might look like.

There is no obligation to proceed afterwards.

Book a coaching chemistry conversation

Capability alone is not always the whole problem. In complex roles, the real constraint may be an assumption, a relationship, an informal expectation, an unspoken political dynamic or a behaviour that no longer produces the evidence others need to see.

Executive coaching creates a confidential space to think clearly, test assumptions, understand the system around you, and practise the behaviours that matter where performance is actually judged.

I may challenge the client’s assumptions, help them rehearse a different behaviour, clarify the story they are telling themselves, map the stakeholder system or identify what needs to become visible to others.

The work often asks:

• What is really happening here?
• What are others likely concluding?
• What does the role or market now require?
• Where is the actual constraint?
• What are you avoiding?
• What behaviour would create better evidence?
• What conversation needs to happen next?
• What would a more senior version of you do here?
  

The coaching relationship is confidential, candid and practical. The aim is not simply to feel better after the conversation. The aim is to become more effective in the situations that matter.