How do you Exec Coach? / Hannah Yan Field
Learning from Executive Coaches.
Good morning! This is the sequel of my “How do you CEO” series.
I’ve been working for an Executive Coach for 3+ years - he will be the final interview of this series. I love the way we can unpack big problems and work on strengths. So, naturally, I had to understand how that magic works to become a better manager and coach myself.
~ 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.
#1 Hannah Yan Field
How do you executive coach?
I think of coaching as holding up the mirror for an individual to self-reflect, to understand who they really are, what their yearnings and aspirations are, and to help them unpack the ways that they've gotten in their own way throughout their life.
It's not just a focus on professional objectives and achievements. Coaching can include themes in one’s personal life, because life is not neatly compartmentalized – it's all integrated. The most important role we have as coaches is to hold up the mirror, to challenge directly and courageously, to say the things that no one in the client’s world is ever going to tell them, to give them the feedback that people are too afraid or feel too conflicted to share. Then we help them develop a strategy to get to where they want to be in life.
What drew you to becoming an executive coach?
I was working in the early stages of high-growth companies like Dropbox and Canva and developed a really broad set of operating skills. I then worked as a venture investor for not quite 5 years and had a come to Jesus moment when I realized that investing and being a steward of funds for 10-20 years was just not going to get me out of bed in the morning.
When I reflected on all of the jobs I had, my natural temperament and leadership style, and what people valued in their relationships with me, I recognized that I had a real skill around quickly connecting and developing deep relationships with people, and creating a vulnerable space for them to safely show up as they are. I'm not there to judge and I'm not there to cast opinions. What I am there to do is to facilitate the kinds of conversations that spark deep self-inquiry and self-reflection, and hold space for people to lean on their own resourcefulness and wisdom to develop and grow themselves.
What is the most common question your clients ask you?
Clients often gravitate to me because of my experience – they judge a book by its cover and say, “Oh, you've worked at these great companies and you’ve worked in VC, so you know my world.” And that's a beautiful connecting point. It helps me have a natural empathy for the challenges they are facing and the environments they are working in. But sometimes I have to subtly remind them that my job is not to give them the answers. And frankly, it would be my ultimate disservice to clients to be telling them what to do or giving them the answers, and not enabling them to develop their own capacity to self-solve.
A common generic question I get is: “I’m having to make a big decision and I’m debating between Options A or B - Hannah, what do you think I should I do?” And guess what: I'm not going to tell you what to do. But what we are going to do is to unpack the context surrounding your fork in the road, and systematically, rationally and instinctively work through the drivers and mindset that is driving your decision-making. Together, we can seek a deeper understanding of what matters to you, what’s holding you back, filter signals from noise, and explore the underlying dynamics that are compelling or repelling you from certain decision pathways.
Do you have a mental framework of good questions to ask?
Powerful questions tend to be how and what questions as opposed to why, which can tend towards a knee-jerk reaction of prematurely assessing a situation or casting judgment or an assumption about something or someone. How and what, on the other hand, are expansive broad questions that unlock context and insight, rather than just pure information or speculation. The responses to those kinds of questions may not immediately reveal “the answer”, but they can circuit-break someone from leaping to solutions or getting hooked on unhelpful emotions, and expand the space between trigger and response so that they can be curious about what is really going on and be more conscious of and in tune to what truly matters.
Holding up a mirror to oneself requires curiosity and curiosity does not always come naturally for people. By utilizing these kinds of questions, I can help clients learn to self-reflect and develop their muscles of self-awareness and curiosity.
What questions should your clients ask more often?
95% of the time, clients seek out coaching because they need to solve problems. Often those problems are interpersonal. When a client comes to me and they're venting about something or someone and is confronted with challenging emotions, the question I think is worth asking is:
How am I complicit in creating the circumstances that I'm not happy with?
We tend to be very externally focused and say, well that situation is fucked, and this person did this thing, and if only they took more ownership, etc. And fair enough, life is hard, work is stressful, and people can be frustrating. They're infinitely variable and fickle and all of that is even harder when you are dealing with extraordinary external commercial pressures. You just want shit to work.
But I think as human beings, we're not naturally good at understanding or examining what our role is in the less-than-ideal circumstances that we’re not happy with. And it’s understandable, because it can be confronting and uncomfortable facing hard truths!
So as an example, in a conflicted interpersonal dynamic, valuable questions to explore might be:
What's happening in this relationship that isn't just about the other person’s actions or behaviours?
I’ve adopted a perspective of what’s happening here. If there’s an alternate and equally true perspective here, what might that perspective be?
If I were to step into their shoes, what might their perspective of me be in this conflict?
How am I engaging with them in a way that's eliciting the worst parts of their behaviour?
How am I showing up in our relationship?
Am I disempowering them? And if so, how might I be disempowering them?
Looking at organizational dynamics, you might ask: How am I showing up as a leader who is stunting the growth of my executive team? For example, am I creating a culture of apathy because I'm so controlling about everything? Or because everything needs to go through me, I'm becoming the bottleneck of my organization and not allowing people to thrive, grow, and make mistakes?
Lastly, one of my favourite questions to ask clients is: “What is fact versus what is fiction?”
Our brains are naturally wired to connect a bunch of dots of information in order to quickly make sense of the world around us. This can be helpful in some ways, but unhelpful when we knit together narratives laden with assumptions about circumstances and people which aren’t true, fueling conflict with others and within ourselves. By going back to first principles of what is factually true and delineating that from the narratives we generate to drive our perspectives, we can make more honest assessments and make better decisions.
This kind of reflection is helpful for clients to improve environmental and internal awareness, learn from their mistakes, and ultimately augment their capacity to have greater agency and self-authority in their lives.
What tools do you use to understand your clients?
I always kick off with a discovery session which runs for about two hours. I provide a few assessment tools, but the bulk of the work is a set of self-reflection questions.
They are questions like:
What is the vision you have for your life
If there were no limitations in the world, what would you be doing
What are your drivers and motivations in life and work
What is your relationship with failure
What is your relationship with success
What permission do you need to give yourself
What do you know to be true that you’re not acting on right now
We also establish 2-3 high-level objectives they want to get out of the coaching engagement. It’s important that we’re clear on what their North Star is, but sometimes this changes depending on what surfaces over the course of the coaching engagement.
I spend a huge amount of time reviewing their pre-work, teasing out broader themes that come up through their reflections. As a coach, it’s critically important that I build trust quickly and develop an intimate understanding of who my client is so that we can move on to the meaty work.
It's a really powerful session (or so I’ve been told!). A significant percentage of clients will end up crying in the first session because there are things that surface that are so deeply personal or they’ve been too afraid to share or talk about. The questions I ask aren't everyday questions that we chat with our mates about or even our family.
It can be very intense and emotional to have someone witness deeply personal things about them and to play back themes around the relationship that the client has with herself. But it's one of the most beautiful parts of the process because we're building this incredibly robust relationship together, a shared language about how to talk about them, about what's important to them.
I'm working with complete strangers and I need to go from zero to a hundred so that there is space for transparency, trust, and vulnerability.
Then, I introduce a framework that I'm a huge fan of which is called positive intelligence, a tool for developing mental fitness. It’s a powerful tool that looks at the ways in which we self-sabotage, specifically around emotional reactivities and behaviors. A lot of these behaviors are very old and are survival mechanisms that we developed pre-adolescence as we learned to navigate and problem-solve our way through the world and the unique circumstances we found ourselves in. By understanding the root cause of some of the unhelpful symptomatic behaviours that we exhibit in our lives, we can then utilize tactical approaches to managing them so that they don’t derail us in our present day.
Is there one particular tool or test that helps you understand someone most?
I don't think there's one single tool or test that’s the be-all-end-all. As mentioned before, the Positive Intelligence framework has a useful online assessment which surfaces an individual’s saboteurs or unhelpful default behaviours and emotional reactivities. These are the kinds of limiting voices in our head or behaviours that stand in our way of building more productive relationships, being more effective decision-makers and problem-solvers, and having a grounded sense of well-being.
Examples of these saboteur archetypes are:
The hyper-achiever is highly focused on external success and drives us to depend on constant performance and achievement for self-respect and self-validation.
The stickler which is perfectionistic and highly critical of ourselves and others
The controller has an anxiety-based need to control situations and people’s actions based on one’s own will
To be clear, I look at assessments as conversation starters for deeper reflection rather than a means of labelling and pathologizing people, and this particular framework I’ve found helpful in enabling people to take a non-judgemental, curiosity-driven approach to examine their own limiting behaviours and beliefs.
When should someone get an executive coach?
I look at leadership from a more holistic perspective, with the term “leadership” having nothing to do with line management, but rather, with an individual who wants to take radical responsibility for their impact on the world.
If you're someone who's in a position where you have the opportunity to have a lot of impact and influence, whether it's in your organization or in your broader life, I think a coach can be really valuable for you.
I do think that when you're early in your professional career, you have limited life experience, so I don't feel that coaching is necessarily the best modality to go to. I find that coaching can be most valuable for folks when they are mid-career or later. That being said, I don’t think it is about your title. It is about having sufficient life experience and when you’re on a meaningful trajectory or life transition.
How can someone find an executive coach?
The only organization that I'm aware of in Australia that does coach matching is Co Lab. Maxine Minter runs a small tight-knit community of vetted coaches. They work with a bunch of clients out of the US, a bunch of tech companies out of the US, but they also work with folks in Australia. I'm one of their vetted coaches.
Nearly 100% of my clients to date have come to me via word of mouth, and it’s also how I found my own coach years ago, May Samali, who is stellar and who I’d also highly recommend!
My strong recommendation is to try to interview a couple of coaches. When you interview just one, it's hard to assess fit in isolation. Coaching is such a personalized experience, on the same level as finding a therapist, so you want to feel like you're really engaged and connected authentically with someone. If you're going to be opening up your life story to that person, it’s important that you are able to build a solid foundation of trust and connection.