Executive Coaching & Leadership Discovery Form

Important Note: This analysis provides strategic insights to help you get the most from your form's submission data for powerful follow-up actions and better outcomes. Please remove this content before publishing the form to the public.

Overall Form Strengths & Purpose Alignment

This Executive Coaching & Leadership Discovery Form is a master-class in balancing depth with usability. It positions itself as the gateway to a transformational coaching engagement and delivers on that promise by collecting rich, multi-dimensional data while respecting the executive’s scarcest resource—time. The form’s progressive disclosure keeps early questions light (consent, language preference) before escalating to introspective narrative sections, reducing cognitive overload and early abandonment.

The structure mirrors a best-practice coaching intake: context → vision → strengths → gaps → logistics → commitment. Each section has a clear instructional paragraph that signals why the questions matter, turning data collection into a micro-learning moment. Conditional logic (e.g., "Other" language, 360-follow-ups) keeps the experience conversational rather than interrogative, while the optional assessment section reassures privacy-hesitant leaders that baseline data is voluntary. Taken together, the form maximizes both data quality and the coachee’s first impression of the coach’s professionalism.

Question: I consent to the storage and processing of my responses for coaching purposes.

Purpose: GDPR/CCPA-compliant consent gate that prevents any data from being saved without explicit permission. For executive clients—who often have heightened privacy concerns—this checkbox is both a legal shield and a trust signal.

Effective Design: Placing consent immediately after the welcome paragraph capitalizes on the reciprocity principle; the user has just read a warm, confidentiality promise, so clicking "yes" feels consistent with the tone rather than a legal hoop. Making it the only mandatory item in the first section creates a low-friction first step, increasing the likelihood of form completion.

Data & Privacy Implications: Because coaching engagements may later involve 360 data, psychometric results, or even medical-adjacent information (burnout, sleep), capturing broad, upfront consent avoids the need for repeated re-consent emails that can break the coaching momentum.

User-Experience Angle: Executives are time-pressed; a single checkbox is faster than a multi-clause e-signature workflow, yet it still satisfies most data-protection audits. The affirmative wording (“I consent…”) frames the user as an active partner rather than a passive data subject.

Question: Full name (as you wish to be addressed)

Purpose: Personalization engine for every future touchpoint—session agendas, invoices, contracts, and celebratory emails. Using the client’s preferred name reduces power distance and accelerates psychological safety.

Effective Design: The parenthetical prompt clarifies that the answer needn’t match a passport, accommodating executives who use anglicized names or nicknames. This small nuance prevents the awkwardness of a coach repeatedly mispronouncing or mislabeling a senior leader.

Data Quality: Free-text rather than split first/last fields avoids parsing errors when cultures have multiple family names, honorifics, or hyphenated surnames. It also future-proofs against CRM import issues that often fracture non-Western names.

UX Friction Risk: Virtually zero; everyone knows their own name. The field is short, auto-complete friendly, and placed early when motivation is highest.

Question: Current job title

Purpose: Instant calibration of organizational seniority, stakeholder complexity, and likely leadership pressures. A C-suite title triggers deeper strategic-vision questions, while a first-time team-lead title shifts the focus to foundational delegation skills.

Effective Design: Open-text allows for creative titles ("Chief Trouble-Maker") that reveal personality, yet still supplies structured data when normalized later by the coach. Mandatory status ensures segmentation is possible for cohort reporting (e.g., average clarity-of-vision by hierarchy).

Business Implications: Coaches often price engagements or select co-coaches based on scope inferred from title. Missing this field could lead to under-scoped proposals or mismatched chemistry calls.

Privacy Note: Although titles can be identifying, the form’s earlier consent and confidentiality paragraph mitigates concern. No organization name is mandatory, so clients who truly wish to remain incognito can still comply.

Question: In one paragraph, describe what ‘success’ looks like for you in the next 12 months

Purpose: Creates the North-Star metric against which coaching ROI will later be judged. It also surfaces hidden agendas (promotion, politics, family motives) that might otherwise emerge only after several paid sessions.

Effective Design: The single-paragraph constraint forces clarity and prevents sprawling essays. The placeholder example models specificity (NPS uplift numbers) rather than vague aspirations, subtly teaching the client how to think in outcomes.

Data Richness: Text analytics can later bucket responses into themes—revenue, team engagement, personal well-being—giving the coaching practice aggregate insight into what senior leaders most value.

Risk of Abandonment: Because this is the first long-text mandatory item, the form wisely places it after low-effort demographic questions, ensuring sunk-cost motivation kicks in.

Question Matrix: Self-doubt/impostor feelings … Lack of strategic focus

Purpose: Quantifies the leader’s self-identified derailers without triggering social-desirability bias. The 1-5 scale is granular enough to detect change over time yet simple enough to complete on mobile between meetings.

Effective Design: Clustering six common leadership pain points in a matrix reduces screen length and cognitive load compared with six separate questions. The item order—starting with emotional (self-doubt) and ending with cognitive (strategic focus)—mirrors how many executives experience stress.

Coaching Utility: These six items map directly onto popular 360 instruments (Hogan, EQ-i 2.0), enabling the coach to pre-select tools that validate or challenge the client’s self-perception.

Privacy & Sensitivity: Although the questions are introspective, they are framed as common challenges (“keeps you up at night”), normalizing vulnerability and increasing response honesty.

Overall Summary of Strengths & Minor Weaknesses

The form’s greatest strength is its narrative arc: it moves from concrete facts to reflective depth, mimicking a real coaching conversation and thereby priming the client for the actual engagement. Mandatory fields are limited to identity, consent, and the single most critical outcome question, striking an optimal balance between data sufficiency and completion rate. Conditional logic and optional assessments prevent the “survey fatigue” that plagues many leadership diagnostics. The inclusion of well-being questions (sleep, burnout) signals a holistic, modern coaching philosophy rather than a purely performance-oriented one.

Minor improvement opportunities include: (1) adding a progress bar for mobile users who may underestimate the form’s length, (2) allowing file upload for existing 360 reports rather than manual re-entry, and (3) clarifying time-estimate language (e.g., “takes ~12 minutes”) to set expectations. Nonetheless, the form already exceeds industry standards for executive-intake experiences and positions the coach as thorough, empathetic, and digitally savvy.

Important Note: This analysis provides strategic insights to help you get the most from your form's submission data for powerful follow-up actions and better outcomes. Please remove this content before publishing the form to the public.

Mandatory Field Justifications

Question: I consent to the storage and processing of my responses for coaching purposes.
Justification: Without explicit consent, the coaching practice cannot legally store, process, or even email the client back under GDPR/CCPA and similar frameworks. Making this mandatory protects both the client’s privacy rights and the coach from regulatory penalties. It also establishes psychological safety from the very first click, signaling that all subsequent sensitive data (360 feedback, burnout disclosures) will be handled ethically.

Question: Full name (as you wish to be addressed)
Justification: Personalization is foundational to executive coaching; the coach needs a consistent, respectful way to address the client across contracts, session agendas, and milestone certificates. Because titles and signatures may vary later in the journey, the preferred name serves as the single source of truth for all communications. Leaving this optional would force the coach to guess or repeatedly ask, undermining professionalism.

Question: Current job title
Justification: Title is the fastest proxy for organizational scope, stakeholder complexity, and likely strategic pressures—variables that directly influence coaching objectives, tool selection, and pricing. A missing title would prevent the coach from tailoring pre-work, selecting appropriate assessment instruments, or assigning a co-coach with sector expertise, thereby diluting the ROI of the entire engagement.

Question: In one paragraph, describe what ‘success’ looks like for you in the next 12 months
Justification: This open-text answer becomes the contracted North-Star outcome; every subsequent session is retro-planet against this vision. If left optional, clients could enter coaching without clarity, leading to scope creep, ambiguous success metrics, and dissatisfaction. Mandatory articulation forces a concise vision that can later be mapped to SMART goals and tracked for ROI demonstrations.

Overall Mandatory Field Strategy Recommendation

The form adopts a “minimum viable mandatory” philosophy: only four fields are required, all clustered in the first half of the experience. This design respects the seniority and time scarcity of executive users while still capturing the non-negotiable data needed for legal, contractual, and directional clarity. Research in form-completion psychology shows that each additional mandatory field reduces submission rates by 3–7%; keeping the count at four keeps the abandonment risk under 15% even for mobile users.

Going forward, consider making two more fields conditionally mandatory: (1) if the client selects “Other” under language, the free-text specification should become required to prevent null values, and (2) if burnout symptoms are acknowledged, a brief description could be mandated so the coach can flag urgent mental-health referrals. Otherwise, retain the current optional-heavy approach; executives are more willing to disclose sensitive data (360 history, stakeholder maps) once they trust the process, and that trust is best built by allowing them to control depth. Continue to visually distinguish optional vs. mandatory items with micro-copy such as “required for initial proposal” to manage expectations without sounding legalistic.