Athletic directors spend their working lives developing other people. They coach the coaches, mentor the young staff, manage up to administration and out to parents and donors. Almost none of them have anyone doing the same for them.
That is not a character flaw. It is a structural gap in the job. The higher you go, the fewer people are positioned to give you honest feedback, and the more expensive your blind spots become.
What isolation actually costs
Left alone long enough, three things reliably happen. Blind spots develop, because nobody in your building is in a position to name them. Apathy sets in, because there is no one asking whether you are still growing. And focus drifts, because urgency is loud and importance is quiet.
None of those arrive announced. They accumulate, and then one day a leader who was excellent five years ago is coasting on what used to work.
Proximity to other leaders is the correction
Leaders are better when they are in consistent proximity to other leaders who will speak truth to them. Not encouragement, exactly, and definitely not agreement. Truth: the observation you would rather not hear, delivered by someone with no stake in your comfort.
That is most of what executive coaching provides. Structured feedback from outside your building. Someone whose job is to ask the question your staff cannot ask you. And accountability against the goals you set when you were thinking clearly, not the ones the week has handed you.
Not a crisis service
The leaders who benefit most from coaching are rarely the ones in trouble. They are the ones already performing well who understand that nobody sustains excellence alone, and who would rather be developed on purpose than corrected in an emergency.