Executive coaching program operations

Help your leaders grow. Give your coaching program a home.

MHG provides mentor-coaching services that help leaders navigate challenges, build confidence, and develop their leadership. Our Ascend platform connects the people, resources, and information that support their progress. Partner with MHG to deliver your program, or use Ascend with your own coaching team.

Explore Mentor Coaching Explore Ascend
Your coaching One place
Next session
Wed 10 March, 2:00 PM
How to join
Video — link in your session
Objectives
4 active · 2 acknowledged
Your materials
Agreement, action plan, resources
To remember
Nothing — it is all here

Illustrative. One workspace instead of a mailbox to search.

Monthly status report Generated
Hours delivered
418.5 this period
Engagements
147 active · 5 initiated
Matches
24 coaches · credentials current
Participation
6 inactive beyond 90 days
Assembled by
No one — queried from live data

Illustrative figures. Every line is a stored field, not a monthly write-up.

Where Ascend came from

Built from experience. Shaped by everyday use.

Ascend grew out of more than 25 years of MHG’s mentor-coaching experience. Across our projects, we developed smaller systems to solve practical problems — coordinating schedules, sharing resources, and keeping program managers informed. Ascend brings the best of those systems together.

Built by and for the people doing this work every day, Ascend reflects what they need: fewer back-and-forth emails, simple workflows, and direct access to the right information. Participants, coaches, and managers share one workspace, with access tailored to their roles and confidential coaching conversations protected.

The principle

Coaching programs fail quietly. Ascend makes the quiet part visible.

A coaching program rarely collapses. It drifts — a participant stops scheduling, a coach quietly takes on too many clients, an engagement runs out of hours mid-arc, a credential lapses. None of it announces itself, and by the time it reaches a status meeting the quarter is gone. Ascend is built so those things surface while they are still recoverable.

1

One system, not five

Intake, matching, agreements, scheduling, hours, and assessments live together. Reporting is not a reconciliation exercise across a mailbox, a spreadsheet, and a shared calendar.

2

Decisions keep their reasoning

Why a particular coach was matched to a particular leader is recorded with the match, when the reasoning is fresh — not reconstructed a year later when someone asks.

3

The report is a query

Hours, participation gaps, re-enrollments, coach load, and outcomes are stored fields. The sponsor runs the report themselves, whenever they want it, without asking the vendor.

The lifecycle

Five stages, each one accountable.

Every engagement moves through the same instrumented path, so the hundredth is administered as carefully as the first.

  1. 1

    Intake

    Requests are received, reviewed, and triaged against eligibility and available funding, with a structured needs instrument — not free text.

  2. 2

    Match

    Candidates are surfaced on fit from a maintained bench, with valid credentials and available capacity as hard filters. The selection rationale is recorded — and so is any reassignment.

  3. 3

    Agreement

    Coaching agreements are generated with the sponsor's required terms, signed electronically, and gate the first session. No agreement, no session.

  4. 4

    Coaching

    Sessions carry their time, format, and joining details, shared with coach and participant only. Objectives, action plans, and assessments are tracked, with hours drawn against those authorized.

  5. 5

    Report

    Monthly and annual reporting generates from the same records the program ran on. Nothing is retyped, and nothing goes stale.

Confidentiality

Sponsors see the program. Coaches and clients keep the conversation.

This is the hardest requirement in any coaching program, and most systems resolve it with a policy and good intentions. Ascend resolves it with architecture: authorization is deny-by-default in the application, and the coaching content itself is encrypted field by field — so it is not readable from the database either, by us or by anyone who reaches it. No administrative role can read coaching content: not the sponsor's, and not ours.

The sponsor sees

Program office, contract oversight, coordinators

  • Requests, triage status, and routing
  • Coach matches and the recorded rationale
  • Executed agreements and their terms
  • Sessions scheduled, held, and missed
  • Coaching hours delivered, per person and in total
  • Participation gaps and inactivity
  • Re-enrollments, completions, and closure reasons
  • Where each engagement stands in the journey

Nobody but coach and client sees

Not the sponsor. Not MHG administrators.

  • Session notes and what was discussed
  • Raw assessment results
  • 360 interview content and attributed statements
  • Observations from shadow sessions
  • The leader's stated fears and career intentions

Progress is reported as journey stage and the participant's own acknowledgement of their objectives — factual, and theirs to share. A coach's private read on a client never travels upward.

This is stated plainly to every participant when they enroll. An executive coaching program that senior leaders do not trust is a program they do not enroll in — and enrollment is the precondition for every outcome the sponsor is paying for. Candor about the boundary is what produces participation.

The MHG method

Two questions, asked in parallel.

MHG's Mentor-Coach framework was developed across federal engagements with chief information officers, chief information security officers, and Senior Executive Service candidates. It rests on a distinction the platform encodes directly rather than merely describing.

Mentor

Your day job

The role you hold now — the reorganization you are leading, the team you are rebuilding, the conversation you have been avoiding. Mentoring is experience applied to the problem in front of you.

Coach

Your next job

The role you are becoming ready for — presence, judgment, the bench you need to build behind you. Coaching is inquiry applied to the leader you intend to be.

Every objective in an engagement is tagged to one lens or the other, and both are visible side by side. Leaders engage differently with their own development when the two are named separately — and the sponsor gets a defensible view of progress without anyone reporting on the substance of a conversation.

  1. Wants & NeedsWhat matters, structured
  2. AssignmentThe match, with reasoning
  3. KickoffAgreement and expectations
  4. DeepeningNeeds revisited
  5. ShadowObserved at work
  6. 360Interviews, synthesized
  7. One-on-OnesThe sustained work

What the participant gets

A workspace, not an inbox.

For most coaching programs the participant's experience is a stream of email — a scheduling thread, an attachment, a survey link, a reminder about the attachment. The leader being coached is the one person the program exists for, and usually the one with the least visibility into it. Ascend gives them one place instead.

Their next session

When it is, in their own time zone, how to join it, and one click to put it in whatever calendar they already use. A reschedule is proposed and agreed, never imposed.

Their objectives

Tagged to the two lenses, with progress the participant acknowledges themselves — their own account of how it is going, not a status someone else recorded about them.

Their materials

Agreements, documents, development resources and surveys in one place, available when they need them rather than found by searching a mailbox for a thread from four months ago.

Nothing reaches participants until the sponsor approves it. Program communications move from draft to submitted to approved before anything is sent, and the approval is recorded against the version that was approved — edit the message afterwards and it has to be approved again. An approval never silently survives a change to what it approved.

Built for regulated programs

Designed for the environments coaching actually happens in.

Executive coaching in government and regulated industry carries obligations that consumer coaching tools were never built for. Ascend is designed to them from the first commit rather than retrofitted to them later.

Authentication
Multi-factor authentication using time-based one-time codes, with single-use recovery codes; no SMS factor
Data protection
Encrypted in transit and at rest, with field-level encryption on coaching notes, meeting joining details, and survey responses
Isolation
Deny-by-default authorization, with every read scoped to the requester — an unauthorized record is not found rather than filtered out of the page
Audit
Tamper-evident event log, each entry hash-chained to the one before it so the chain can be verified end to end
Accessibility
Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 Level AA — tested on every screen and every role, at desktop and phone width, with an accessibility floor enforced on each commit; conformance report available on request
Coaching standards
Aligned to International Coaching Federation ethical standards; credential currency verified continuously

Who it is for

Programs with more than a handful of leaders in them.

Ascend earns its place once a program has enough engagements that no one person can hold it in their head — and once someone above the program has to answer for how it is going.

Government programs

Agency-wide or department-wide coaching spanning multiple components, each with its own budget, cohorts, and reporting line — with the oversight and confidentiality obligations that come with public service.

Enterprise leadership development

Succession and executive development programs where coaching is one part of a larger investment, and the organization needs to see participation and outcomes without intruding on the coaching itself.

Coaching providers

Firms managing a bench of credentialed coaches across several clients, who need matching, capacity, credential currency, and client-by-client reporting to hold together as they grow.

About Mason Harriman Group

See it against your program.

Ascend was built by Mason Harriman Group (MHG) out of running executive coaching programs for federal leaders — and out of the conviction that a coaching program should be as accountable as anything else an organization funds, without ever putting the coaching conversation at risk. We would be glad to walk you through it.

info@mhgascend.com