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.
Executive coaching program operations
The coaching program, instrumented.
MHG Ascend runs the operational side of an executive coaching program — intake, coach matching, agreements, sessions, assessments, and reporting. Because the work happens in one place, the status report is a byproduct of it rather than an assembly of it. The sponsor can pull the report on any day of the month and it is already true.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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1
Intake
Requests are received, reviewed, and triaged against eligibility and available funding, with a structured needs instrument — not free text.
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2
Match
Candidates are surfaced on fit, with valid credentials and available capacity as hard filters. The selection rationale is recorded.
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3
Agreement
Coaching agreements are generated with the sponsor's required terms, signed electronically, and gate the first session. No agreement, no session.
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4
Coaching
Objectives, sessions, action plans, and assessments are tracked, with hours drawn against hours authorized so a ceiling arrives with warning.
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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: the boundary is enforced in the application and independently in the database, so a mistake in one is not sufficient to cross 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.
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.
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.
- Wants & NeedsWhat matters, structured
- AssignmentThe match, with reasoning
- KickoffAgreement and expectations
- DeepeningNeeds revisited
- ShadowObserved at work
- 360Interviews, synthesized
- One-on-OnesThe sustained work
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.
- Hosting
- Amazon Web Services, United States regions carrying a FedRAMP Moderate authorization
- Control baseline
- Designed and operated to NIST SP 800-53 Rev. 5 Moderate
- Data protection
- Encrypted in transit and at rest, customer-managed keys, field-level encryption on coaching content
- Access
- Federated single sign-on to the sponsor's identity provider, inheriting smart-card authentication; enforced multi-factor for all others
- Isolation
- Deny-by-default authorization in the application and row-level security in the database
- Audit
- Tamper-evident application log plus independent database-level auditing
- Accessibility
- Built to Section 508 and WCAG 2.1 AA as a development requirement
- Coaching standards
- Aligned to International Coaching Federation ethical standards; credential currency verified continuously
Stated plainly: Ascend is designed and operated to the FedRAMP Moderate control baseline and is authorization-ready — meaning the security documentation and evidence exist to support a sponsoring agency's Authority to Operate. Ascend does not itself hold a FedRAMP authorization. That process requires a sponsoring agency and twelve to eighteen months, and we would rather tell you where we are than imply otherwise.
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