Executive coaching tools and techniques: where the coaching model lives between sessions

Executive coaching tools and techniques divide into four kinds: a model worksheet, a coaching platform’s goals and action-plan module, a general meeting notetaker, and a session-report builder. None of the models they hold is best. Tandem Coach’s models page, pulled 2026-10-04, names five that experts use, GROW, STEPPA, OSKAR and CLEAR among them.

Which model suits the person across from you is your call; no receipt here makes it more. A receipt can settle something narrower: whether the document you open the morning after still has your model’s stages as its headings. Call that the Monday file.

What are the criticisms of the GROW model?

That coaches walk its stages as a straight line. TrainingZone’s case for ditching the GROW model describes an over-reliance that “can make it difficult to move flexibly through a coaching conversation”, and the Library of Professional Coaching leads with the same worry about linear use.

GROW has four stages, as Brooks and colleagues describe it in Frontiers in Psychology, 2023. Performance Consultants publishes the model and credits Graham Alexander, Alan Fine and John Whitmore together, not Whitmore alone.

A fillable version, and where the answers go afterwards, is in the GROW coaching model worksheet, whose stage questions also work as box prompts.

Which approach keeps the model in the Monday file?

The worksheet does, because its headings are the stages. The platform modules keep notes, action plans and goals, and their pricing pages do not say whose stages those sections follow.

Approach	What it keeps between sessions	Price, pulled 2026-10-04	Built for whom
Model worksheet: GROW, CLEAR, Co-Active	The client’s answers under the model’s stage headings	Not pulled	A coach who wants the stages visible
Platform module: Simply.Coach	Session notes, action plans with reminders, goal planning, on every tier	STARTER US$9 to LEAP US$69; billing basis not in the pull	A coach running the engagement in one place
Platform module: CoachVantage	Client goals and assignments, notes and files shared with clients	Not captured in the pull	The same coach, plus contracts and booking
Meeting notetaker: Fathom	The meeting’s own record, in the notetaker’s own order	Not captured in the pull	Anyone recording calls, coaches included
Session-report builder: Ember Console, closed beta	Each session written into your template’s boxes, each with its prompt and eval	Closed beta, not stated	A coach whose model is already a set of sections

I build Ember, so treat that row as a declared interest.

Both pricing pages list what gets stored and never the headings it is stored under, which is the question to ask before you buy.

How do you measure a coaching program over time?

By what each row leaves on record, because no outcome figure here belongs to any of them. A worksheet leaves the client’s words under the stage headings, and Simply.Coach leaves an action plan with reminders attached to it. A notetaker leaves a record of the call. A report builder leaves one document per session in the same sections, so the newest can sit beside the first.

What is proven is only the storing. Whether it moves a leader’s behaviour is unknown, and no adult coaching trial settles it. Where the record of an agreement lives is the subject of accountability coaching systems compared.

Open the Monday file. If your model’s stages are not its headings, the model finished when the call did.

Questions people ask next?

What techniques improve client engagement between sessions?

No receipt here answers that. One r/lifecoaching poster describes losing clients in the between-session stretch after trying Slack and Notion, and an r/Coaching poster reports almost no engagement between sessions from both coaches they hired. Two accounts, not a rate.

How do I match a method to a client’s personality?

As your judgment. Tandem Coach’s page, pulled 2026-10-04, pairs its models to situations rather than personalities: GROW to performance goals with clear metrics, OSKAR to an executive feeling stuck, CLEAR to an ambiguous leadership challenge. Write down which model you used, so the file says.