In conversation with David Howells, Group CEO, Pacific International Executive Search
Pacific International has officially launched a leadership coaching and onboarding service today. The new services are designed to accelerate leadership effectiveness, reduce transition risk, and deliver measurable business outcomes faster.
Margaret Jaouadi asked CEO David Howells why Pacific International is expanding its services in this direction, and what it means for its clients.
Margaret Jaouadi: Why now, and why is coaching a natural step for Pacific rather than a side venture?
David Howells: Launching new services is incredibly exciting. For a long time now, we stayed focused on our core client offering: retained executive search. But our value to clients extends past any single search. It runs deeper than one engagement.
Offering leadership coaching services naturally reflects that evolution in our client partnership. We’ve clearly stepped up the roles we win and deliver. We now run more C-suite searches for large clients worldwide, help build talent pipelines, and support succession planning. Despite the quality of those hires, leadership transitions carry risks, so more and more CHROs and executive teams want to mitigate them and ask us to help those leaders succeed. Coaching answers that need. Supporting new and newly promoted leaders opens fresh ways to deliver value.
Margaret Jaouadi: Your coaching page opens with “Finding talent is the beginning. Help them succeed by turning potential into value.” What does that mean in practice?
David Howells: As an executive search firm, our role has always been to act as an extension of our clients’ business. Typically, we help executive talent acquisition teams and their CHROs find the best talent, internally or externally, to fill leadership gaps.
The first six months in a new role are the turning point. Any new leader spends that time getting to know the business, building relationships, and understanding their role in the organisation. If you shorten the timeline before they execute and deliver value, you change the outcome. That is why we launched this practice.
We have learned this with clients before. Some benefited from executive coaching and then offered it to support leaders we helped place, and the feedback was incredible. Those individuals stayed, grew and developed into larger roles. That stickability is another reason I believe this practice will succeed, for Pacific and, more importantly, for our clients.
Margaret Jaouadi: The service spans 3 tiers: onboarding, strategic leadership coaching and C-suite executive coaching. Can you walk us through how it’s designed and what differentiates Pacific’s coaching bench?
David Howells: We shaped this carefully, seeking counsel from our advisory board and speaking with many of our C-suite clients. That includes CHROs of Fortune 500 companies, private equity-backed businesses, and private companies. We hold a strong portfolio across all three.
Onboarding coaching is probably the most straightforward to understand. Clients bring a new leader into an organisation, and it can feel very lonely at the top when someone first joins. Feeling vulnerable is natural, yet showing that vulnerability to internal stakeholders and peers can be a real challenge. Onboarding coaching supports them through the first three to six months. An hour a week, or every two weeks, gives real value without taking much time from their schedule.
Strategic leadership coaching supports leaders stepping up in scope, scale, or complexity, helping them shift from expert or individual contributor to enterprise leader and strengthening the succession pipeline. This service also suits coaching a leadership team as a group. Leadership skills and group assessment play a key role in determining the group’s cohesion. We are Hogan accredited, but our coaches use several other assessment solutions. Pulling those individuals together creates great value, whether for a new leader or someone who will one day reach the C-suite.
C-suite executive coaching is what it sounds like: it’s delivered to address the demands of the top job. What sets Pacific’s coaching bench apart is that they are all former industry professionals, many of whom have held numerous C-suite roles. They have lived and worked as the leaders they coach. They are more than career coaches, and that distinction matters. After leaving their corporate careers, they sought accreditation as executive coaches. Coaching is a chance to give back and keep contributing meaningfully beyond an executive career.
Pair one of them with a new CFO at a mid-sized industrial company, and they will have an incredible amount of experience and examples to support this new leader in their role. Equally, they are an accredited coach who will help them perform at their best, and under pressure. That is the key differentiator, and it is the right recipe for success.
Margaret Jaouadi: Research consistently indicates that leadership transitions are among the most common and most expensive points of failure in an organisation. What are you seeing in clients that convinced you this is a real unmet need?
David Howells: When we talk to CHROs, this sits on their agenda in every conversation. We hear it from existing customers and now from new clients too. That is the first thing I would say.
A CHRO of a large organisation is spinning many plates. Talent development and retention matter enormously, because they protect the investment in every hire. No one wants a revolving door at leadership level. Yet some organisations have seen three, four or five different C-suite leaders in the space of three years. That is incredibly derailing. How can you drive a strategy through if a key leader leaves every six or nine months?
Then there is the domino effect. Many leaders who join an organisation bring people with them. We recently placed a COO into a global industrial manufacturer, and that individual brought a couple of trusted people from their network into the leadership team and levels below. If that COO leaves, others may follow. Replacing them costs money, but it is also cultural, and it can feel unsettling across the organisation.
Even a strong appointment faces transition risk, and early support can accelerate leadership effectiveness and deliver measurable business outcomes faster. This COO, though, is supported through executive coaching. That was one reason the individual joined. They saw an organisation that truly values its people. Their thinking was telling: I am working with an executive coach, and the leadership team I have brought in can be coached as well. The business impact is huge. Organisations see that value carried through in their teams.
Margaret Jaouadi: Some boardrooms still believe strong leaders shouldn’t need coaching, and that asking for support is a sign of weakness. How would you challenge that, and how is the thinking about coaching at the top actually changing?
David Howells: That mindset needs to change. In the post-COVID world, people feel further apart. So much communication now happens on video rather than face-to-face, though that is starting to return to more familiar ways of working.
Look at mental health at the top of large organisations. When you examine why senior leaders have left major Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies, you see more and more reasons linked to burnout and mental health. Coaching is not a silver bullet. But executive coaching, and supporting leaders as they come into a business, can mitigate these risks.
Think about elite athletes. They all have coaches. How do they draw the highest performance from themselves? Yes, they self-motivate and turn up at 5 am to train. Yet a coach helps them make step-change improvements in everything they do to reach the top performance.
An executive coach supports a leader professionally, but the value goes further. I have had a coach myself to help me with the strategic direction of our organisation. He is a former lead partner of a billion-pound consulting business, so we came from similar professional services industries. He was incredibly helpful, and he changed how I think about things happening professionally and personally, and how I reframe them to lead better. Elite athletes do this all the time, and so do top CEOs. That belief that seeking coaching is a weakness should be banished from the boardroom. As more companies realise its value, hopefully those comments dissipate.
Margaret Jaouadi: Say an HR leader is convinced coaching is right for their leaders, but needs to win over a sceptical board. What’s your advice? How do they build the business case and frame the ask to get signed off?
David Howells: Firstly, coaching usually sits in a different budget from the recruiting budget. Even so, I would line up what a business spends on recruitment against what it spends on executive coaching, and then rebalance. There is real opportunity for a senior HR leader here. Look at the recruitment spend and its return on investment, and at the points where leaders have fallen away and had to be replaced.
So what is that cost? There is the figure in Euros, Dollars or Pound Sterling. Then there is the underlying cost: the cost of disruption, and the cost of the time invested in onboarding a new leader. If we’d spent more time coaching them, what would the outcome have been?
Most organisations already have two or three people in mind for an initial proof of concept with an executive coach. That cost shrinks into insignificance very quickly against the value. When you put a new or future C-suite leader in touch with an external coach, they choose that coach based on fit. Most of the time, the choice sits with the leader, not the organisation. Once you see the output after the initial coaching round, the business case builds and gets signed off very quickly.
Margaret Jaouadi: Anything you would like to add?
David Howells: We are very excited to launch this new offering. Our advisory board members were really helpful in framing and scoping the service. They know the value the service brings firsthand, as most of them received leadership coaching earlier in their careers, and the learning still serves them today. One went on to become CEO of a $10 billion company, another the chief supply chain officer of a Fortune 500 business, another the CHRO of one of the largest chemical companies in the world.
Each of them had a coach reasonably early, perhaps twenty years into their career, but exactly when it mattered most. They remember those coaches incredibly fondly and still keep in touch today. That relationship between a leader and their coach holds real value. It lasts well beyond the six, nine or twelve months they spend together, and they go on to refer the coach to others who would benefit from their support.
This is not a new way of working. It has been around a long time, and some businesses have been real innovators. But after COVID, and with the way people now think about talent and retention, it should be on the desk of every CHRO and leadership team. The question is simple: how are we supporting our high-potential talent in their career development? How are we ensuring the success and accelerating the value of the new people we bring in? We’re happy to have that conversation and run a scoping exercise with any company.
For a confidential no-obligation scoping discussion about how Leadership Coaching can turn talent into value faster, please contact Manuel Preg or enquire via our Executive and Leadership Coaching webpage.