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Whether your next step is a bigger org or a bigger scope.
Close Cohen Career Consulting is a nationally recognized executive career coaching firm with clients across the United States. Its Leadership Coaching program serves two groups of senior professionals: Senior Managers and Directors moving toward Director, Senior Director, and VP roles, and senior individual contributors — Staff, Senior Staff, Principal, Distinguished, and Architect-level professionals — advancing on the technical track without moving into people management. Both tracks are coached one-on-one by a senior Close Cohen coach using the same five-step method, at the same level of engagement. Close Cohen has coached hundreds of professionals from Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Meta, Nvidia, Anthropic, Starbucks, Walmart, Adobe, Roblox, J.P. Morgan Chase, Moody’s Analytics, and Macrobond Financial.
The firm has been recognized as Best Executive Career Coach five consecutive years. Coaching focuses on the specific transition in front of you: defining the target level, closing the blindspots that stall a promotion, building the visible signals decision-makers weigh, and expanding influence across the organization. For people-managers that means scope, executive presence, and leading leaders. For individual contributors it means building influence across teams you don’t manage, getting credited for impact that ships through other teams, and the promotion packet that documents both.
78
Five-star reviews
2,500+
Executives coached
Compensation increases from five-figure to six-figure gains — within the engagement window.
The work is the same caliber. What changes is what we’re building toward.
You’re running a team, or teams of teams, and the next level isn’t coming automatically. Common starting points:
What we build: a defined target role, a blindspot map, the visible leadership signals promotion committees actually weigh, and cross-functional influence beyond your own org.
You’re advancing on the technical track by choice, and the ladder above Senior is narrower, slower, and decided differently. Common starting points:
What we build: influence upstream of the decisions that affect your work, attribution for impact that ships through other teams, a scope and blast-radius strategy, and a promotion packet that documents all of it.

















Outstanding senior-level mock interview training that works.

I always left my sessions thinking I can do this, never defeated.

You’re exactly where you need to be if your goal is to:
Close Cohen is headquartered in Seattle and works with clients nationally and internationally. All coaching is delivered one-on-one over video. Clients come from Seattle, the Bay Area, New York, Austin, Chicago, Raleigh-Durham, Washington D.C., and internationally.
Close Cohen amplifies your impact by empowering you with candid leadership insights, new strategy and breakthrough outcomes.
We want to know your career ambitions. With your coach, you’ll collaborate to define your goals and identify immediate wins.
Our strategy leads with where you excel, but we don’t shy away from your weak points either. You’ll work with your coach to identify both early, so you have a clear roadmap to achieve your goals.
Working backwards from your goals, you’ll receive custom field assignments that are embedded in both your work and personal lives. Maximize your time by focusing on steps that will have the impact you desire.
At the executive level more than ever, success comes down to influence and executive presence. Whether you’re presenting to the board, setting organizational vision, or building global teams, your coach will work with you to amplify your influence.
You’ll receive regular, supportive thought partnership to help you master your learnings and get the results you’re after with a seasoned executive coach.
Leverage Close Cohen’s proven framework built specifically for executives and senior-level professionals.




















Produces phenomenal results.

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Through this program you’ll…
You don’t have time to waste. We remove the guesswork and provide your action-oriented project plan custom to your career needs.
Influence is critical for success at the senior-levels. Close Cohen employs a structured framework to deliver candid feedback and amplify your strengths.
Make informed decisions with Close Cohen’s customized power mapping and strategic analysis, guiding you with the best path forward.
A proven, tailored approach with a seasoned executive coach to achieve the results you’re after.
Close Cohen works with senior marketing professionals navigating promotion, executive influence, job search and leadership transitions — from Senior Marketing Manager and Director through VP, CMO and senior marketing IC roles.
Our coaching team includes former senior marketing executives with firsthand experience leading brands, teams, growth organizations and complex businesses.















Executive career coaching is a structured, one-on-one engagement where a senior-level coach works with you to clarify your goals, strengthen your leadership presence, and build a concrete strategy for your next career milestone. At Close Cohen, coaching is not therapy or generic advice. It is a goal-driven project with defined milestones, field assignments, and measurable outcomes. Each engagement follows our proprietary five-phase framework: intake and blindspot assessment, strategic project plan, field assignments, executive presence development, and synthesis.
Close Cohen works with Senior Managers, Directors, VPs, senior individual contributors, and C-suite leaders with at least five to seven years of career experience. You are likely a fit if you have been passed over for a promotion, are preparing for a senior-level job search, have recently stepped into a new leadership role, or feel stuck despite strong performance. Close Cohen coaches individual contributors at Staff, Principal, and equivalent levels alongside people managers. Managing a team is not a requirement. Close Cohen is likely not the right fit for professionals in the first few years of their career.
Close Cohen offers a complimentary 20-minute intake consultation to understand your goals and recommend the right program. Pricing is discussed during that call based on the scope and duration of your engagement. We offer custom coaching packages tailored to each client’s specific career objectives.
Most clients engage with Close Cohen for three to six months, depending on the scope of their project. Common project areas include promotion campaigns, job transitions, executive presence development, and team leadership coaching. Some clients return at multiple career inflection points over many years.
Promotion at this level is decided on demonstrated scope, executive presence, and organizational influence, not tenure. Close Cohen’s Executive Career Coaching works one-on-one to define the target role, close the specific blindspots holding the promotion back, and build the visible leadership signals decision-makers look for.
Influence without authority comes from being in decisions early rather than reacting to them late. The most common failure at Staff and Principal level is technical credibility that arrives after a direction is already set — being asked to review instead of to decide. Close Cohen coaching maps who actually holds influence over the decisions that affect your work, and builds a plan to enter those conversations upstream.
This is structural, not personal. Senior IC work is often enabling work — the platform, the architecture, the design that unblocks someone else’s launch. The shipping team gets the announcement; you get a line in a doc nobody reads. The fix is attribution at the time of the work, not at review time: named artifacts, written acknowledgment from the receiving team, and a record built as the work happens. Close Cohen coaching covers exactly how to do this without appearing to campaign for yourself.
Document the counterfactual: what would not have happened, or would have happened slower or worse, without your contribution. Promotion committees can see shipped features; they cannot see the architecture decision that made three of them possible. Close Cohen coaching works on identifying that evidence while it’s still visible, and framing it in language a committee that has never worked with you will recognize.
No — and the discomfort with it is one of the most common blockers at senior IC level. There is a real difference between claiming credit after the fact, which reads as territorial, and establishing attribution as the work happens, which reads as clarity. Close Cohen coaching works on the specific language and timing that make this land as professional rather than political.
Close Cohen coaches senior individual contributors alongside people-managers. That includes Staff, Senior Staff, Principal, Distinguished, and Architect-level professionals on the technical track. Managing a team is not a requirement. IC engagements focus on scope, cross-organizational influence, and promotion packets rather than headcount and org design.
Promotion to Staff is decided on scope and blast radius, not on individual output. The step change is impact that extends beyond your immediate team — work that other teams depend on, technical direction others follow, and problems you identify before they are assigned. Close Cohen coaching focuses on building that evidence and documenting it in a form promotion committees recognize.
A promotion packet is the written case for your advancement, typically assembled by you and your manager and reviewed by a committee that has never worked with you directly. It documents scope, cross-team impact, technical influence, and peer testimony. Close Cohen coaching covers what evidence to gather, how to frame ambiguous contributions, and how to close gaps before submission rather than after a rejection.
Both tracks reach senior levels, and neither is a demotion. The choice usually comes down to whether your leverage comes from depth or from multiplying others, and whether you want your impact tied to systems or to people. Close Cohen coaching works through the decision deliberately, including what each path looks like at your specific company, rather than defaulting into management because the offer appeared.
Yes, if you are at a senior level and advancement has become the constraint. Close Cohen coaches Senior Managers, Directors, and senior individual contributors — the levels where promotion shifts from performance to scope, visibility, and influence, and where the criteria stop being written down. It is not a fit for professionals in the first few years of their career.
Yes. Close Cohen has coached senior professionals at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, Meta, Nvidia, Anthropic, Adobe, and Roblox, across engineering, product, design, and data. Coaches are former senior leaders from Amazon, Google, Zillow, Starbucks, Moody’s Analytics, Motorola, SC Johnson, and Expedia, and have sat on the hiring and promotion side of the table at that level.
Both use the same Close Cohen method, but the emphasis differs: Director-level searches weight scope-of-impact and cross-functional influence, while VP and C-suite searches weight enterprise strategy and board-facing presence. Coaching is tailored to the altitude you’re targeting.
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Reviewed by Laura Close, Founder — Close Cohen Career Consulting.
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We are excited to discover more about your career development or job search goals.
You’ll hear from us soon!