Focused coaching for senior leaders working through a specific challenge — a new role, a difficult decision, a conflict, a transition. Four sessions. Purposeful and complete in itself.
4 session
60 min each
Individual 1:1
The engagement
Not every leadership challenge requires a capacity development programme. Some challenges are specific, bounded, and time-sensitive — a new role that needs navigating with precision, a conflict that has become entrenched, a significant decision that needs working through, a transition that is proving more demanding than expected.
Targeted Coaching is a focused four-session coaching engagement designed for exactly this. It has a defined scope — the specific challenge the leader brings — and a defined structure. It doesn’t assume a methodology in advance: the approach is shaped by what the challenge requires. Some engagements draw on CDL framework tools and language. Others work differently. The starting point is always the challenge itself.
This is coaching, not advice. The work is directed at developing the leader’s own thinking, perspective, and capacity to navigate their specific situation — not at providing answers or recommendations.
Common entry points
Targeted Coaching is appropriate when a specific, named challenge is the priority and when a defined, time-bounded engagement is the right container for working with it.
Challenge 01
The transition into a new leadership position — new stakeholder landscape, different authority dynamic, unfamiliar organisational culture. The challenge is often less about the role’s demands and more about how the leader is calibrating to it: what they’re holding that they don’t need to, what they’re not yet inhabiting that they should be.
Challenge 02
A persistent relational difficulty with a peer, a direct report, a board member, or a stakeholder. The situation has been addressed at the surface but keeps returning. The work is usually about what is driving the leader’s response to the dynamic, not just the dynamic itself.
Challenge 03
A consequential decision in conditions of genuine complexity, incomplete information, and competing stakeholder demands. The leader has the information. What they need is the internal space to think it through clearly.
Challenge 04
A conversation that has been avoided, deferred, or handled badly — with a board, a team, a chair, a peer. The preparation required is not script-writing; it is establishing the internal orientation from which the conversation can happen well.
Challenge 05
A leadership context demanding more than usual over a sustained period — organisational change, restructuring, crisis response, sustained stakeholder complexity. The challenge is managing the internal cost without the performance degrading.
Challenge 06
A change in reporting structure, a merger, a leadership team change, a shift in role scope. The leader needs to navigate the transition with clarity rather than reactivity.
Session structure
Each session has a distinct function. The structure is consistent; the content is shaped entirely by the challenge the leader brings.
1
60 min
The challenge is scoped with precision: what is actually happening, what has already been tried, where the leader’s thinking is currently stuck or incomplete, and what a useful outcome from four sessions would look like. The Engagement Intention Statement — the leader’s articulation of what they want to be different at the close — is agreed in writing at the end of this session and becomes the reference point at every subsequent session.
The decision about whether to include the E2C Assessment is made at the end of this session, based on the nature of the challenge and the leader’s preference.
2
60 min / 90 min if E2C included
When the E2C Assessment has been included, the leader completes it between sessions 1 and 2. Session 2 opens with a structured debrief — what the Assessment reveals about the current energetic baseline, stress response profile, and where the constraint is concentrated — then moves directly into the first substantive working session. The extended length (90 min) accommodates both without adding a session.
Where the E2C is not included, this is a standard 60-minute working session continuing directly from where session 1 closed.
3
60 min
The substantive centre of the engagement. By session 3, the challenge is well-understood and the working approach established. This session goes deepest — into the specific constraint, the pattern driving it, the thinking that needs developing, the internal obstacle that needs working. The exact content is determined by what has emerged in sessions 1 and 2.
3
60 min
Consolidates what has shifted across the engagement and establishes what the leader carries forward. The Engagement Intention Statement is returned to: what has changed? What is now available that wasn’t at the outset? What, if anything, remains open?
This session also names a natural next step where one exists — whether that is independent application of what has been developed, a continuation of this engagement, or a structured CDL programme if the work has surfaced a deeper capacity question.
Optional at entry
The E2C Assessment is available as an optional element of the Targeted Coaching engagement. Whether to include it is determined in session 1, based on the nature of the challenge and the leader’s own preference.
Some challenges are primarily situational — a specific decision, a conversation to have, a transition to navigate. For these, the E2C adds limited value: the most useful thing is to work the situation directly.
Other challenges that present as situational turn out on examination to have a structural dimension. A conflict that keeps recurring despite direct address. A pattern of response in high-pressure situations the leader recognises but can’t shift. A persistent internal cost that doesn’t match the objective demands of the role. In these cases, the E2C provides data that makes the engagement significantly more precise: it maps the energetic baseline, the stress response profile, and the Compression Profile — where the leader’s system characteristically narrows under pressure.
The decision is made in session 1. If the nature of the challenge suggests a capacity architecture underneath the presenting issue, the E2C will be offered with an explanation of why it adds value here. If the challenge is genuinely situational, it won’t be.
The Assessment is completed online between sessions 1 and 2. It takes approximately 20 minutes. The debrief is integrated into session 2, which runs to 90 minutes where the E2C is included. The Assessment does not add a session to the engagement.
The E2C Assessment does not define the agenda for the engagement or redirect it toward capacity development. It provides data that may sharpen the work on the specific challenge the leader brought. Whether it later informs a decision to explore the CDL programmes is entirely the leader’s choice — not the outcome of a sales process.
FIT
You have a specific, named challenge to work through
Not a general sense that leadership is harder than it should be, but a specific situation — a conflict, a decision, a transition, a relationship dynamic, a pressure context — that you want to address with precision in a bounded container.
You want coaching, not advice
You are not looking for someone to tell you what to do. You are looking for a skilled, structured thinking partner who can help you develop your own thinking, perspective, and judgement on the challenge in front of you.
A four-session engagement is the right container
You want a purposeful, defined engagement with a clear scope and a clear close. Four sessions is enough to go deep on a specific challenge without losing focus.The results are there. The effort required is increasing. There is no visible breakdown — only a gradual shift in the texture of leading, from inhabiting to managing. This is the most common entry signal in the senior leader population, and often the point at which Layer 1 work is most valuable.
You may be new to coaching or new to CDL
Targeted Coaching is a natural entry point for leaders who haven’t worked with a coach before, or who want to understand how Jan Krueder works before committing to a longer CDL engagement.
The challenge is a persistent pattern, not a specific situation
If the same difficulty keeps arising in different forms — recurring conflicts with different people, repeated narrowing under pressure across multiple contexts, a consistent internal cost that doesn’t respond to situational changes — the challenge is likely architectural. A CDL programme is the appropriate starting point.
You want a structured, evidenced development arc
If the goal is a measurable, documented change in leadership capacity over a defined period — particularly where an organisational sponsor is involved — one of the CDL programmes provides the structured arc, formal measurement touchpoints, and evidence chain that Targeted Coaching does not.
You are in the middle of a CDL engagement
Targeted Coaching is a standalone offering for leaders not currently in a CDL programme. If you are already in a Foundation, Expansion, or Sustained engagement, the challenge you are facing is working material for that engagement — not a reason to start a parallel one.
A brief confidential conversation to establish whether this engagement is the right fit and whether the timing is right. No charge, no commitment.