How do you Exec Coach? / Maxine Minter
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).
👉 here is the list of the above recommendations
To find coaches, I’ve also been recommended:
#5 Maxine Minter
How do you executive coach?
Most of my time these days, I think about accelerating other coaches, through the Co Lab network. I have a handful of clients, but don't take a lot of individual clients anymore.
As a coach, the core job is to accelerate the person that you work with as fast as possible to being the best version of their goals they can be. So it's not for you to determine the goals nor how they should get there. You are a pure accelerant as opposed to a director or an advisor.
A framework I like for analyzing the zones of acceleration is the concentric circles of relationships.
The first circle is the intra-personal relationship at the core.
The second is our interpersonal relationship.
The first influences how we show up in the second. The way that we talk to ourselves, our mental models, and our narrative of what we're doing in that role, influences how we interact with the people that we're operating with.
The third circle is systematic / organisational systems. As a CEO, your intra- and inter-personal relationships will influence the systems that you build - the comp structure, the remuneration structure, who gets celebrated, who achieves high status in the organization, and maybe even the brand that you build, the product that you build, etc.
So I spend a lot of time thinking about each one of those layers and supporting the clients I work for to accelerate across them
Which circle do people need the most help with?
It depends on the situation that person is in.
My observation is lots of first-time CEOs are unaware of the impact of their interpersonal relationship on the organisational systems that they're building. So helping them shine a light on each of those layers and think deeply about what is it that they want to build from a place of intentionality as opposed to just the default mode is valuable.
For Series A founder, I spend a lot of time on systems. Very frequently, we don't think of an organization as a system. We don't think of an organization as a progression of interaction points that all have to run well together to produce the outcome we're trying to produce. So we make the classic mistake of making it an interpersonal problem as opposed to a system problem. As an example, someone might be underperforming but actually, it's because we don't have the right systems in place. There are lots of inefficiencies and you end up spending a lot of time supporting.
How do you balance asking more questions vs telling them the answer?
I think that this is a common misconception that the coach has the answer.
I see a lot of new coaches that we work with at Co Lab. We spend a lot of time vetting coaches because we're looking for the best in the world at coaching Founders, Start-up Execs and Investors. What we look out for is that the advisory line doesn’t get blurred.
Let's double-click on that example of “whether I am running the right experiment in the company”. As a coach, you get to spend a handful of hours with the client every month.
What is the probability that that coach has better information about the right experiment to run than the founder who lives and breathes this space, and thinks about this problem all the time?
Instead, what coaches are great at is introducing the right resources to frame up the problem with that founder, and introducing the right frameworks for development. And for that founder to then use that tool to find out what the answer is for them.
How do you think about overstepping your boundaries as a manager?
I can always share my experience. I think about my experience as an informational input for them to make the decision. My job is to build the capacity of the executive that I work with.
I think this is best understood by an analogy. If I was trying to teach you how to play NBA quality basketball against the 90s Chicago Bulls. Imagine Michael Jordan is on the other side for you. Me, academically, explaining the rules and strategies of basketball, and the way you need to move your body and your hands, to be able to play a good game, the probability that I then put you on the court and you have any chance against Michael Jordan is very low.
We're talking about instinct-level skills. We're not talking about just theoretical knowledge. Leadership and quality management are as much about theoretical skills as it is about instinct-level skills. So I think a huge area of value for executive coaching is the safe space to do those drills and to learn them as fast as possible.
So to butcher my basketball analogy, there are lots of people out there who are dribbling a basketball with two hands and flat palms and have no idea how to do it. And no one has shown them a better way to tent your fingers over the ball and use the natural elasticity in your muscles, suddenly you’d get a faster, more agile movement. But I can't tent their fingers for them and push it down on the ball. And so I can only introduce the theory and then let them do the drills to develop it into mastery.
I think of it in the same way when you see someone apply a strategy that I think is ill-fated. You give them the framework, you highlight for them, it might be more valuable. And talk through it in the session, dust off their nerves or get some of those reps in early, for example, before a difficult conversation or a board meeting. So they go into the meeting with slightly less rookiness.
What do your clients ask you most about?
The most frequent request is that they want someone who's done exactly their path before to just show them how to do it.
The reality is that no one has walked exactly their path before them. What they are really asking is they want someone who can help them be better at what they want to be and accelerate them along that journey. And the skill here is to develop the kind of mental models and skill toolkit so that they can walk any path and be successful.
The more common tactical questions are usually:
My team isn't performing.
I need to level up my skills to keep pace with what my company needs.
I'm not getting enough out of my leadership team.
Help me build skills in performance management, having difficult conversations, etc
Help me and my team focus on the “most important things”.
Where do I find an executive coach? Tell us about Co Lab.
That's what we exist for. Co Lab came out of my experience coaching and getting asked over and over again how to find the perfect executive coach. What we do is that matching process between our clients and a suite of the world’s best exec coaches for founders, start-up execs and investors. Our coaches have worked with the exec teams of Notion, Plaid, Linktree, Coinbase and investors at many of the big funds in Australia.
The problem with finding exec coaches is that the world's best executive coaches don't advertise. They don't build big public brands. They don't do a lot of business development because they generally run books of 5-10 clients at a time and that's it and operate almost exclusively on referral.