Virginia Mansell, Founding Partner and Executive Coach
Being a CEO today is no longer about setting strategy and steering the ship. It’s about navigating complexity, leading in a volatile and uncertain world, responding to intense scrutiny, and operating with little margin for error. That’s why CEO coaching and mentoring has become a strategic imperative as it helps leaders stay effective, visible, and resilient at the top.
Today’s CEO faces a highly unpredictable environment: compressed strategy cycles, demanding boards, vocal stakeholders, increasing regulation, AI-driven disruption, and global uncertainty.
As Virginia Mansell, SMG’s Founding Partner, puts it: “CEOs are under a magnifying glass, being scrutinised from all angles, by everyone. Everything they say and do is judged, magnified and remembered.”
Against this backdrop, leadership mentoring and coaching have shifted from a leadership development option to business-critical levers. It accelerates clarity, sharpens influence, and creates the space for CEOs to think, reflect, and lead with intention in a safe and confidential way.
Why top CEOs turn to coaching and mentoring
Many CEOs begin their tenure with deep functional expertise and sharp commercial instinct. But once in the seat, they quickly face a stark reality: success at the top isn’t just about strategy. It’s about relationships, adaptability, influence, presence and self-awareness.
In our recent report, Accelerating CEO Impact and Success, some estimates place the failure rate of CEOs within the first 18 months at as high as 50–70%.
Virginia Mansell, who coaches and mentors many of Australia’s top leaders, puts it simply: “Self-awareness isn’t a soft skill. It’s a strategic one. It underpins every decision a CEO makes. Those who lack self-awareness won’t survive in the long term.”
Coaching provides CEOs with a safe and confidential space to challenge their assumptions, examine their impact, and refine their approach. Mentoring offers something different yet equally vital: commercial know-how and lived experience. It brings insight to market cycles, navigating change and asking the right questions to draw out clarity. Even experienced CEOs can revert to defensive leadership behavioural patterns under pressure. Coaching built on executive experience and behavioural insight helps them recognise these patterns before the consequences unfold.”
Many CEOs describe the role as ‘lonely and isolating’. Having a trusted, seasoned advisor who has “breathed the air” of the top job can be the difference between surviving and leading.
As one SMG CEO client put it, “If I had my time again, I would spend more time developing relationships with the Board – understanding how they think, drawing on their experience, asking questions and listening to their perspectives – rather than just running the business.”
What CEOs actually focus on
The development needs of a CEO differ from those of an emerging leader. Based on insights from more than 1,500 coaching engagements and SMG’s proprietary Leadership Capability Framework, six development priorities consistently emerge:
- Influence
- Executive Presence
- Self-Awareness
- Building Relationships
- High-Performance Teams
- Communication
These aren’t abstract concepts. They are visible, measurable behaviours that shape strategic success.
SMG coaches often work with CEOs on:
- Creating alignment between board expectations and executive execution
- Defining success and performance standards
- Aligning the strategy with execution
- Building high performing teams
- Leading cultural integration post-acquisition or during periods of growth
- Developing systemic thinking around legacy and long-term organisational impact
- Refining leadership narratives in high-pressure environments
“The most effective leaders use coaching to accelerate alignment, expand influence, and deepen impact. It’s not about fixing problems, it’s about driving performance.” – Virginia Mansell.
CEO coaching vs mentoring. Why leaders need both
Coaching and mentoring are often used interchangeably, but the distinction matters. Coaching is outcome-focused and behavioural. Mentoring is experiential and strategic. SMG offers a unique blend through its Executive Coach Mentors: senior leaders with corporate track records and behavioural science qualifications.
Here’s how each contributes:
- CEO coaching enables deep self-reflection and self-awareness. It helps leaders observe and correct their behaviour, understand the impact their leadership style has on their direct reports, strengthen executive presence, and build decision-making and communication capability
- CEO mentoring provides contextual insight. It guides CEOs through macro-level issues, supports stakeholder engagement and improves board dynamics
This dual lens is what makes SMG’s engagements high impact.
With the pace, challenges, and uncertainty of today’s environment, we’re seeing an increasing number of exhausted and depleted leaders. Mentoring provides one critical lever to combat this, helping leaders maintain energy, clarity, and balance.
To illustrate how this dual lens works in practice:
A newly appointed CEO from a merger engaged us for coaching. The focus was on setting strategy and direction, building relationships and bringing the team together. Mentoring supported fast integration and alignment of a divided leadership team, then in the ‘storming stage’. Within six months, the executive team was performing and operating with renewed cohesion, and employee engagement scores improved.
Lessons from the field: what shifts with the right support
A female CEO in a male-dominated sector worked with us to strengthen her personal leadership brand. Through mentoring, she sharpened her strategic voice. Through coaching, she elevated her presence and impact in the boardroom. Within a year, she was invited to chair an industry-wide leadership roundtable.
Behind the scenes, our work with her involved stakeholder mapping, leadership narrative building, and executive presence practice through video and real-time rehearsal. We coached her to identify unconscious self-censoring tendencies and replace them with more empowering, authentic behaviours grounded in her values.
Another example is a long-serving COO client who was promoted to CEO. They had to learn to let go of detail and trust their team. Our coaching helped them shift from execution to vision. To stop being the engine and start being the compass.
Our focus was on delegation and practical tools for letting go while maintaining visibility. It was a structured approach to building strategic space, which helped reframe and shift their leadership style from execution to direction.
Another one of our CEO clients learned to ‘listen longer and talk less’. The result? A more empowered executive team and faster decision-making across the organisation.
What sets SMG CEO coaching and mentoring apart
Not all coaching is created equal. CEOs don’t need frameworks. They need context. They need to be challenged. And they need coaches who understand behavioural change, cultural and organisational dynamics, and business performance.
That’s why SMG coaches are all former senior executives. Many have served as CEOs. Some are current serving Chairs and board directors. They blend a rare blend of commercial acumen and experience with deep coaching expertise. Many have qualifications such as MBAs, Masters, and International Coaching Federation (ICF) credentials.
SMG’s methodology is:
- Grounded in behavioural science
- Tailored to the leader and the business
- Designed to deliver measurable outcomes
- Confidential, context-specific, and commercially relevant
As Virginia Mansell says, “It’s not about what the model says. It’s about what this CEO, in this context, needs to shift for them to have impact.”
CEO coaching and mentoring that meets the moment
Today, CEOs face fewer clear answers and more high-stakes decisions. They must lead people, drive performance, shape culture, manage risk, communicate with influence, and remain adaptable and resilient themselves.
Leadership at this level isn’t about getting it right all the time. It is about leading with presence, creating space for reflection, and being open to growth.
The best CEOs don’t go it alone. They invest in their leadership to bring out the best in others.
SMG helps CEOs accelerate their leadership impact, not by telling them what to do, but by challenging them and helping them think more clearly about what matters most.
Explore how SMG’s CEO mentoring and coaching programs are helping some of Australia’s senior leaders deliver results and lead with clarity, presence and purpose.
