A client said something to me last week that made me both smile and think (probably more like think-smile-think actually). They’d told their HR team that we were coming in to do some work with them, and the response was:
“That’s great… those people are like unicorns.”
So they were describing external help be it, coaches, facilitators, and generally people who help them to get better. People that typically come in and help leaders think, align, and improve performance, as Unicorns.
I thought on this for a while actually, and I do get it. When external support is good, it can feel like something you’ve not experienced before. Someone comes in, listens properly, spots what’s going on quickly, asks the questions nobody else is asking, and suddenly some things that seemed difficult actually change.
So yes, I understand why it gets labelled a unicorn.
But here’s the bit that I think is important as we get going into 2026.
When something is described as a unicorn, what I believe people are really saying is:
“This feels rare. We don’t get access to this very often. And we’re not sure how to make it happen on purpose.”
Why external support becomes “unicorn-like”
In a lot of organisations, there isn’t a normal, reliable route to get external help in the leadership space.
It happens through luck.
Someone knows someone. A leader has used a coach before or an HR person has a trusted supplier. It could even be that some budget suddenly appears or things get bad enough that an emergency spend gets approved.
So it becomes a bit mythical. The process to access it could be experienced as maybe unclear, slow, or even political.
If you’re a leader inside that system, you learn to either stop asking or only ask when it’s desperate.
How would you answer this…
If a leader needed support in the next 30 days, would they know exactly how to make it happen?
People determine value in different ways
I believe that this kind of work gets judged through personal belief more than most services.
To one person, coaching or facilitation is a serious performance lever to pull. It helps teams align, make better decisions, have better conversations, and move faster.
To someone else, it’s “soft”, or non productive time. It can even be deemed as something you do when someone’s struggling.
So with the same type of intervention you get a totally different perception of value. That difference matters because it shapes whether people commission it early (when it can prevent problems) or only reach for it late (when everything is already on fire).
Question for you…
What do your leaders believe external support is for? Performance, development, wellbeing, firefighting… or something else?
Internal process can restrict you getting the best help
I’ve seen this a few times now, as a smaller provider vs the big consultancies and it typically relates to larger organisations.
When you develop frameworks and lock everything into to large, complex tenders with limiting parameters you are essentially creating the unicorn scenario.
It leads to been able to only access support from other larger organisations and go have built kore rigidity into their own ways of working and become less able to fit to demand themselves.
This makes it look like unicorns exist. I know a lot of people in larger consultancies who operate within the parameters given but have so much more to offer. If they went out in their own they would probably be deemed a unicorn too.
What are you settling for in terms of outside in help, because of your own process?
The shift we want to make in 2026
This is the reframing I think is helpful going into this year:
Unicorns don’t exist! It’s your inability to consistently notice and access the best and right help.
It’s great been labelled a unicorn for all of the things that says about how our value is seen.
On the other hand this presents a real challenge for us as it talks to the problem of people who would benefit from our support, not been able to grab hold of it.
If you want leadership alignment, stronger delivery, healthier team dynamics, better decision-making, more accountability then access to good external support should be a real priority.
What would you need to change internally so that mythical creatures stay mythical?
A simple question to start the year with
If external support currently feels “unicorn-like” in your organisation, i’d encourage you to ask:
What makes it so hard to access, or so hard to value properly?
Is it budget? Process? belief? risk? past bad experiences? Lack of clarity on what “good” even looks like?
Because if you can answer that honestly, you’ll probably find the lever you can pull and if you pull that lever, something may change.
What’s one thing you could change in your system this quarter that would make accessing the right support easier?