Executive Coaching
Strengthen how you think, decide, and lead.
Harken's executive coaching is for GTM professionals whose roles demand as much from their judgment and leadership as from their functional expertise. It offers a confidential setting to step back from the pace of work, examine consequential decisions, and understand the patterns that affect performance.
Leadership context
Greater responsibility changes the work.
As responsibility grows, the questions become less technical and the answers less obvious.
You may be expected to set direction with incomplete information, align people with different incentives, communicate difficult realities, develop others, manage investor or board expectations, and deliver results while protecting long-term value.
Experience matters. It can also reinforce familiar assumptions and responses. Coaching creates the distance required to notice what may be difficult to see from inside the situation.
Areas of leverage
Where Harken's executive coaching can create leverage.
Leadership Effectiveness
Close the gap between how you intend to lead and how others experience you, then turn that awareness into practical change.
Decisions and Priorities
Identify the decision beneath the noise, understand the tradeoffs, and move forward with greater confidence.
Influence and Communication
Communicate a clear point of view, adapt to different stakeholders, and build support where authority alone will not carry the decision.
Team Leadership and Talent
Set clearer expectations, give better feedback, delegate real ownership, and increase what others can accomplish.
Conflict and Difficult Conversations
Understand what is at stake, prepare for necessary conversations, and communicate with candor and respect.
Expanded Responsibility
Make the personal shift required by broader scope, whether you are leading others, contributing across the enterprise, or giving experienced leaders room to lead.
Performance and Sustainability
Examine the habits, boundaries, and operating patterns affecting focus, resilience, and the ability to perform over time.
The person within the work
Coaching the person navigating the situation.
Executive coaching creates room to examine how you are interpreting and responding to market pressure, organizational constraints, and complex leadership challenges. The questions below help separate the visible situation from the choices, assumptions, and patterns shaping your response.
Coaching strengthens the judgment, agency, and effectiveness with which you apply your GTM expertise.
In practice
What the work may look like.
Every engagement begins with your priorities. The work can address an immediate challenge while also strengthening how you approach similar situations in the future.
You define what matters, make the decisions, and own the action. Harken founder and coach Scott Ablin provides the structure, challenge, and support that move the thinking forward.
- Prepare for a new or expanded leadership role.
- Establish leadership priorities and a focused operating cadence.
- Improve communication with a CEO, board, investors, peers, or team.
- Work through a consequential people or organizational decision.
- Increase influence across GTM functions and with Product and Finance.
- Lead through transformation, uncertainty, or sustained performance pressure.
Operator-informed coaching
Coaching informed by experience inside GTM leadership.
Every Harken engagement is grounded in coaching. Harken founder and coach Scott Ablin uses thoughtful inquiry, reflection, challenge, and accountability to support client-owned decisions and action.
More than 25 years of GTM operating and leadership experience helps Scott understand context, recognize familiar patterns, and ask grounded questions. Relevant perspective is shared selectively and transparently, while you retain responsibility for the decision and action.
The Harken Coaching Framework
A practical framework for client-owned progress.
Gain Clarity
Identify what matters, define the desired outcome, and distinguish the underlying issue from its visible symptoms.
Take Ownership
Recognize what is within your control, confront choices or behaviors that require attention, and make intentional commitments.
Make Progress
Translate insight into action, observe what happens, and adjust as new information emerges.
Potential outcomes
What progress can mean.
You define the outcomes that matter. Coaching helps bring meaningful progress within reach through stronger thinking, decision-making, and action.
Progress also reflects your choices and follow-through, organizational realities, market conditions, timing, and the actions of others.
- Greater clarity and confidence in consequential decisions.
- More focused priorities and explicit tradeoffs.
- Stronger communication, influence, and leadership presence.
- Earlier, more productive difficult conversations.
- Improved delegation and team effectiveness.
- Greater consistency between intentions and behavior.
- A more sustainable approach to performance and responsibility.
In their words
Scott is unlike any other coach I’ve had. His years of experience make our sessions extremely effective. His deliberate focus on both coaching and advising is the perfect balance for a working professional facing real challenges at work. I’ve learned so much about myself in the context of work and my career with Scott’s thoughtful help. My sessions not only give me space to explore and understand challenges, but also help me devise specific action plans to test solutions. Each week I walk away invigorated and ready to tackle anything.
Thereasa R.Product Marketing Leader
Start with a conversation
Bring the challenge. Start with a Good Talk.
You can begin before knowing what an engagement should look like. The first conversation focuses on your situation and the potential value of coaching.
Schedule a Good TalkNo charge. No obligation. A thoughtful 30-minute conversation with Scott.