Good morning! This is the sequel of my “How do you CEO” series.
I’ve been working with Ben Hudson as my Executive Coach for 3+ years. I’m excited for you all to read more about his style below.
~ Batko, CEO @ Startmate, Founder @ Puddle Pod
Do you have an Executive Coach?
If you do and can recommend him/her - please leave their detail here (1 min).
I have yet to find a good place to find reliable Exec Coaches
👉 so here is the list of the above recommendations.
#6 Ben Hudson
How did you get into executive coaching?
I was always someone that friends turned to for guidance. I've always been interested in people and behaviour and how those two things come together. It wasn't an immediate calling for me to get into executive coaching. I went off to university to study science and was planning to become a vet. I had a spare subject that I could pick up, so I thought I'd study psychology. I fell in love with it very quickly.
HR was only the first few years of my career (which I didn't love) - I then became interested in leadership development and moved into consulting, prior to becoming an operating executive in tech companies in Australia and then Asia. This enabled me to sit on the other side of the desk and gain really important practical experience as an executive leader in large companies. Ultimately the part of the role I enjoyed the most was coaching the leaders that reported to me, so when I moved back to Australia to start our family I joined the global business psychology firm YSC, which is where I started to develop my professional skills in executive coaching. From there I started my own consulting firm around 14 years ago.
How did you get your first paying clients?
It was a bit scary going from sitting in front of a brand with access to a client base to just myself. I tapped my network and dad was top of the list and he introduced me to my very first client - an executive in a large corporate moving into a very senior government role. A key transition, so I went in in support of her. She's actually still a client and a friend these days and was an amazing advocate for me in the early days.
How would you describe your style of executive coaching?
I'm infinitely curious.
I don't have an agenda.
When I first started coaching, I felt like I needed to turn up with something - a model or a theory or an activity. And as I learned and matured I saw it was probably much more a reflection.
So these days, I would say to you, what I do is I just turn up. And I turn up in a way that is all about curiosity and presence. I don't have an agenda. I don't have an outcome that I'm trying to move towards. There are obviously theories and models and you know my training as a psychologist for 8 years sits behind all of it but at the end of the day, I think it's more about humanity than anything else. So if I can be fully present in the room or on a screen with someone and allow them to bring whatever it is that they need to work on, then I think that's enough.
What do your clients ask you most often?
The most common question is “what should I do here?”
The natural starting point for most of us when we're trying to solve a problem is to look immediately for the answer. And sometimes there's this assumption that because I've been doing this for as long as I have, I have that answer. And while that's understandable, it's fundamentally the opposite of what coaching is there to do.
Which is to enable self-directed change.
I don't generally give an answer or an immediate thought, in fact, and you probably can reflect on this yourself.
So my most common diversion technique there would be to turn the exact same question back to the individual. So what do you think you should do?
How do you balance between asking more questions and just telling them the answer?
Firstly, I have to question myself, do I know the answer? Just because I think there may be an answer there, does it mean it's the right one for you?
And so I've got to regulate that, because, the fact that I have an answer also suggests that I'm thinking ahead which means my presence has shifted.
I'm not a purist as a coach. I will at times, if asked for it, offer advice. I will share experiences, mine and others. I'm seeing something that we're struggling to uncover. I may ask for an invitation to just observe what I'm seeing, but ultimately I'll never tell anyone what to do.
I think it comes back to that just that insatiable curiosity. There's always another question. There's always more that you can pack or uncover just by letting the conversation evolve.
Do you have a framework for asking a good question?
It's presence and curiosity. I'm interested in listening to narrative structures and the way that people put words together to construct their reality. I pay close attention to what is being said but also how it's being said. And then just letting curiosity guide me.
I'll even just say back what someone said to me and ask what do you hear in that or what do you notice about the way that you're constructing the story or the way that you're communicating with me?
Because it's not, that I don't have the answers. It's about us finding them together. And sure you see patterns and there are lots of commonalities in this work, particularly with people at similar stages of their development or running organizations that are at similar stages of scaling. There are common problems that you see. But every individual is different. And so the way that they relate to that situation and construct their story and therefore their reality is completely unique. So it's always emergent.
What do you wish your clients asked you more about?
It's more questions that I think they need to be asking themselves. I'm not the oracle there to provide answers. It's about finding the right questions to explore together.
I think a really important question that people should be asking more often of themselves: in terms of this thing that I'm trying to change, move towards or resolve - what am I avoiding or what am I not giving attention to that I know I should be giving attention to?
Often, they take responsibility for something that is not their responsibility to own.
Where is my boundary here?
What is my role?
What is not my role?
Where do I need to be clearer?
What tools do you now use to work with your clients?
First, I like to go through a development review. It's got a few parts to it.
There’s a lifeline, and four psychometrics - decision-making styles, interpersonal style, leadership and how you react under extreme pressure and stress.
They happen all ahead of the first session. The first session is about three hours long. We spend the first part of that session exploring history. So talking about how that person got to be where they are today. And it's a quite holistic conversation. So we go right back to childhood and sort of work through up until the current day. It's the emergence of that conversation that's the guide and always different. Then we brief on the four assessment tasks and marry up themes that I've heard in the conversation with data points.
What are the concepts that you keep coming back on over and over again?
I keep coming back to positive psychology, that's probably a key influencer in the way that I work. So I'm very interested in that optimal combination of high performance and high mental health, positive mental health. I'm very focused on helping people to take a sort of dualistic approach to development where they're thinking about self-care and investment in the things that will bring them resilience and emotional flexibility and optimise their level of impact.
What are the strengths that are unique to them?
What are the values that guide their behaviour?
How do we better understand these things so that we can build capacity for the future?
Mindfulness is something that, I'm deeply passionate about both as a practitioner and also in teaching. I see that as one of the foundational elements of awareness
When should someone get an executive coach?
My intuitive response is when they're ready to do the work. So when I meet someone who's interested in working with me, there are two things I look for.
One is open-mindedness, so willingness to lean into the discomfort, to the vulnerability, to not knowing.
And the second thing is a real commitment for the work. Because coaching is not just reflective space, it's not just pausing and processing, it's actually about change, it's about driving towards what we're trying to achieve.
And so if you're not ready to put the work in that's gonna be required to facilitate growth, then I don't think coaching's right.
How to find an executive coach?
Ask people you know who you think are great leaders about their development and whether or not they've had a coach. I think 15 years ago, it would have been the minority who had a coach. Today, it would be the majority.
Then I would go and meet a number of coaches. I often have people come to me and say they'd love to work with me. I always would encourage them to talk to more than one coach. It's at the end of the day, a relationship.
How do you define success in an executive coaching relationship?
This is always an interesting one.
I don't.
I let the individual define it because it's subjective.
I think it's more important to, at the front end, set some objectives with the individual. I love asking, if this was as successful as it could be, 12 months from now, what would be different? What would people see that was different in you? What would the impact of that be?
Then you figure out how you're going to measure that. I like to do it through stakeholder feedback. For example a 360 or going and interviewing people that sit around my clients and getting their perspective on the things that we've been targeting.
What other nuggets of gold have I missed to ask?
One thing that’s critical but not always intuitive is that high performance is a consequence of good mental health, not the other way around.
Too often I see leaders, fall trap to the “if-then” principle.
If I can just get through this raise, and this product launch, I’ll start taking care of myself.
The “then” never comes, because there's always another “if”.
So I always encourage to think about is, “how am I giving myself what I need in order to meet what I'm trying to achieve?” And it's more than, the basics of self-care, like sleep and exercise, and nutrition. But it's about creating space for meaningful connections with people that matter to you outside of the workplace. It's about creating space for yourself as an individual, not as a business leader or a partner or a friend. It's about investing in the things that we like to do purely for the sake of doing them.
Couldn’t agree with Ben’s last point more. High performance is the result of hard work, and people struggle to do hard work unless they have the energy, and they won’t have the energy unless their physically and mentally well. Great interview.