As a top executive, you increase your impact when the people around you experience you as consistent: The same attitude in good and bad quarters, clear decisions even when they’re unpopular. Standing is the sum of impact and reputation, and it gains weight with every level of leadership.
Top executives deliver peak performance every day, because they can. The broader the responsibility, the more strongly people see person and position as one. That’s exactly where I’ve worked with leaders at the very top and their teams for more than 20 years.
At the top level, people always judge a decision partly by the person who makes it. If you act consistently, you gain standing and presence, and with them a wide sphere of influence. To outsiders, the shaping power of such leaders often seems astonishing, inside and outside the company.
Standing here means a leader’s effect on the people around them, together with their reputation. It’s what people expect of a leader before she or he walks into the room.
That leads to an uncomfortable truth for every leader at the top. Impact there starts long before the presentation, with what people say about you.
The key competence of inspiring leaders is authenticity. You only stay authentic with two things, though: Self-management and a constant feedback loop with the people around you.
The higher the position, the more filtered the feedback. In my experience, you hear little dissent at the top, because dissent aimed upwards takes courage. So your picture of your own impact goes out of date faster than at other levels. Build channels for uncomfortable feedback deliberately, such as a person on the team who’s explicitly allowed to disagree, or a sparring partner outside the hierarchy.
Structured stakeholder feedback such as the GLA360 shows how the people around you actually experience your impact. Repeated after a few months, it also shows whether anything has moved.
Top executives have to take a clear stand at the right moment and make unpopular decisions. Standing then comes from the way you decide: With reasons, and with respect for those who bear the consequences. Giving reasons also means naming the counter-arguments you’ve examined. That way, the people affected see that their view was on the table, even if the decision goes the other way.
If you avoid hard decisions to stay popular, you lose both. The team senses the evasive move, and the board sees the result.
A top executive rarely acts alone. Whether a strategy holds is decided in the leadership team: By how it handles conflict and whether it presents a united front. A team that argues openly inside and holds one line outside raises the standing of every member. Settling conflicts through corridor talk damages it.
My goal in such engagements is a performance culture in which leadership teams lead authentically and people are glad to follow them. That’s why it pays to combine work with the individual leader and work on the team. What the boss clarifies in one-to-one coaching has to hold up in the team’s daily work.
Impact remains a soft term as long as nobody measures it. At the start, I agree measurable goals with my clients, such as a change in stakeholder feedback or concrete behavioural goals that superiors and the board can observe.
On request, I work on a Pay-for-Results basis. The fee is then tied to the agreed results, which forces both sides to set clear goals.
Making what already works even more successful: Many top executives come to me with that ambition. Measurable goals turn the ambition into a working brief.
Strong personalities achieve strong impact, I’m convinced of that. For me, strength means consistency: The same person in the board meeting, in the canteen and in the crisis meeting.
I doubt whether standing is always distributed fairly. Some top executives who do excellent work stay underrated because they never tell others about their results themselves. Coaching can work on that. An organisation that judges performance unfairly will hardly change through coaching alone.
And one more limit: Impact can be measured, character hardly. So I measure behaviour that others can observe, and I leave the personality as it is.
How far you can fall, and how lonely the role is. At the top, there are few people you can talk to openly about doubts, and every decision affects many. So the coaching works intensively on impact, stakeholders and the quality of decisions.
A typical engagement with me runs for 12 months. It takes that long for changed behaviour to show in your environment and become measurable in feedback. Shorter formats suit clearly defined concerns, such as starting a new role.
Yes, and it often makes sense when the impact at the top depends on how the team works together. I then combine one-to-one sessions with team sessions in which the team works on collaboration and shared goals.
Most clearly when the people around you name changes without being asked. Formally, repeated stakeholder feedback shows it, compared with the baseline measurement at the start.
Further reading on hofmann.coach: Top management coaching: Why successful leaders work with a coach · Team collaboration: How individuals become a leadership team · Leadership visibility: How to make your success recognisable · Top management team: How to make excellence visible
Note: This article was first published on 11.07.2018 and was revised and expanded in October 2026.
Cristian Hofmann is an executive coach in Zurich and Schaffhausen (MAS Coaching & Supervision BSO, Forbes contributor). Over more than 20 years he has coached more than 1,500 leaders: CEOs, executive boards and leadership teams in Switzerland, with measurably agreed goals and, on request, pay-for-results. More about Cristian Hofmann.
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