The Executive Identity
Blueprint™
A 3-month, 1:1 engagement for founder-CEOs and executives who have outgrown the goals that built their career.
Define the leader you want to be next, in writing.
Begin a conversationYou have written down everything except yourself.
The strategy, the plan, every decision examined and handed down. The person behind those decisions has not been.
Years in the role leave a residue: goals you absorbed because they were expected of you, and a version of yourself that performance built.
And underneath, a gap between how you intend to lead and how the people closest to you experience your work runs unnamed for years. You feel divided between who you are and the role you hold.
Put what is actually yours into words, test it against how you are experienced, and something changes.
Decisions settle, and you stop re-arguing them at night. The work finds its meaning, and the people around you notice before you have said a word.
Who this is for
You have the position and the results, and they hold up under pressure.
Your own direction no longer does, and you have started to feel the cost: decisions take longer than they should, and more of your energy goes into keeping the pace than into the work itself.
Left as it is, the calendar sets the direction, and the parts of your life outside work keep waiting their turn.
This is 1:1 work, in confidence, for leaders ready to look at that directly.
If what you want is a behavioral toolkit or a productivity system, this is not it.
“The clarity I found turned into concrete decisions about my work and my direction, with steps I could actually take.”
The engagement: 3 months, 3 phases
The Source
- The experiences that shaped how you lead, examined so they stop quietly driving what you decide next
- A first draft of your Leadership Vision, and a 360 survey sent to the people you choose
The Mirror
- The 360 results, returned anonymized: where intention and experience line up, and where they pull apart
- Your Leadership Vision refined with what the 360 shows, including where the gap is costing you
The Move
- Those 3 changes turned into next steps, built on strengths the 360 confirmed and aimed at the leader you have defined
- The first changes taken into your actual work and refined session by session
How it works
12 sessions of 90 minutes over 3 months, online in English or German. One protected weekly session, with room to reschedule.Each session starts from what is live in your week. Between sessions, the work happens where it belongs: in the place you lead.
The first session is where you decide whether to continue. If it is not right for you, your payment is returned in full.
Grounded in Intentional Change Theory, a framework on how leaders change at the level of identity and behavior, validated in peer-reviewed research.
The 3 months are a complete engagement. You can continue for a further 3 months to put the Blueprint to work under real pressure.We discuss both options in the Strategic Alignment Call.
About your coach
Dirk Winterer is an executive coach and advisor for founder-CEOs and executives.
He brings together disciplines that rarely meet.One is operational: CEO experience in Swiss real estate and construction, and 2 decades in corporate consulting inside Fortune Global 100 and 500 organizations.The other is 10 years of monastic formation, daily training in attention and identity.Both shape how this work is held: grounded and direct, concerned with who you are before what you do.
“Working with Dirk, I found my way back to what’s actually mine: my values, my purpose, the life underneath the role.”
Questions leaders ask
Earlier coaching often works to a brief someone else wrote: a company's performance targets, or an investor's growth numbers. Here you write the brief. Before the first session, you name what you have already tried to change that did not hold. That is where we begin.
A 360 survey asks the people who work with you how they experience your leadership. You choose 8 to 12 of them: your team, co-founders, board or investors. Each answers a short online questionnaire, and their answers come back anonymized, set against how you see yourself. Some of it will be hard to read, and some will surprise you the other way. The first session on the results is only for receiving them. Action comes later.
Only the people you invite to the 360 survey, and they know only that you asked for their honest read. Sessions, notes, the report and the Blueprint stay between you and me. If a company pays, it receives an invoice and nothing more. The legal limits are in your agreement.
It is coaching, grounded in Intentional Change Theory, developed by Richard Boyatzis at Case Western Reserve University from decades of research with leaders. If something comes up that a therapist is better placed to hold, I will say so and help you find the right person. You will not be asked to adopt a belief or a practice. My 10 years of monastic formation show in how I listen.
Partly, and openly. The first half is about you and the goals you are still running on. The second half is whether this fits, and if it does, the fee and a start date. You will also find out what working with me feels like, and research finds the relationship between coach and client is one of the strongest predictors of whether coaching works. There is nothing to prepare.
Begin here
The next step is a 60-minute Strategic Alignment Call. We look at where you are and which goals you are still running on.You leave with a clearer read on it, whatever you decide after.
Schedule the callA leader who knows who they are, and what their work is for, leads differently.