How do you Exec Coach? / Sabrina Wang
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:
#4 Sabrina Wang
About Sabrina
Sabrina is the CEO of Evergrowth Coaching for extraordinary leaders of Series A to Unicorn companies. She has quickly grown Evergrowth to over $500K ARR in sales in under 6 months of conception. Evergrowth partners with CEOs, founders, and C-suite execs of best-in-class tech companies. Her clients include CEOs and co-founders of Wayflyer, Synchron, Opswerks, Code States, Tread.io, Tribe, RevenueCat, and more. Sabrina has also coached partners of YC Continuity, General Catalyst, Left Lane Capital, and Innovation Endeavors.
Before starting Evergrowth, Sabrina was the Head of Coaching at Mochary Method, started by Matt Mochary (top CEO coach for Reddit, OpenAI, Coinbase....). She hired, trained, and managed a team that sold $0 to $3m ARR in under a year. Sabrina is well-versed in the engineering, product, and design side of building a tech company. At Headspace for Work, she worked in product management building B2B SaaS products that reached 1 million users.
Sabrina is driven by her mission to help people achieve high performance and find greater impact. Her coaching is heavily influenced by her mindfulness meditation journey, studying Reiki, energy work, and other spiritual modalities.
How do you executive coach?
Effective coaching is based on listening on multiple levels, including words, emotions, and underlying needs.
I listen intently and I'm very present. I usually ask to start with an actual problem that you're facing in your business or personal life or what is keeping you up. I'll be asking a lot of questions and get right to the core of the root cause of their problem. Then, I reflect a mirror back to them.
I'm also a coach who's very biased towards action. When we find a problem, what are we going to do about it? What are the next steps?
I want you to be walking out of that session clear-minded and ready to go with a plan.
What strategies do you use to get to the core of an issue?
It is all about asking the right questions. The process involves pattern recognition and attentiveness to non-verbal cues and what is left unsaid. By observing repetitive themes or significant reactions during discussions, I guide clients towards recognizing underlying problems.
A CEO might come in and say, “something is wrong with our OKR system”, but they get really tense when they're talking about their VP of sales. So I might go and ask, hey, “what is going on here?” And then I also listen for what they're not saying.
When you have your friend talking to you about a failed relationship, you're like,”I see the red flag from the beginning”. So we can all see it so much clearer when we don't hold that fear and anger.
What common challenges do your clients face?
The number one thing that people are having problems with, or they feel a lot of stress about, are people issues—managing conflicts within leadership teams, addressing underperformance, aligning on strategies, and navigating personal relationships in the workplace.
They want to fire someone, they don't know how to do it.
They wanna hire someone, they don't know how to do it.
They are having fights with their co-founders when they're not aligned on strategy.
They're worried about their executives underperforming and they don't know how to talk about it.
These challenges often stem from difficulties in handling conflict and communication effectively.
What do you wish clients would discuss more with you?
I wish that my coachees talk to me more about the blockers in their personal life. I have about maybe 20-30% of people who will come in and give me a lot of personal issues right away. Others take 6-8 months. As a coach, I can never force people to talk about things, but I wish that especially leaders understand how important your personal life is.
Are there common recommendations you find yourself giving to almost all clients?
We have very opinionated perspectives from a Mochary method - an open-sourced Google Doc curriculum that has hundreds of articles.
I would say the number one is about fear and anger.
We have to recognize fear and anger in ourselves as leaders.
The second one is about feedback.
When not to withhold feedback. I think people will say they give feedback, and they know how to give feedback, but are they withholding it? And they say, “oh, it's just a small thing. I'll wait until the quarter review.” No - we have to communicate that right away and that's often uncomfortable. How do you communicate feedback? And when people give you feedback, how do you properly receive it in a way that makes the giver feel like you're really hearing them?
That links to the third most common advice about reflective listening.
One of the biggest differentiators in leadership is how well you listen. For example, by repeating back what they're saying and not adding any of your own agenda.
How do you balance asking questions with providing advice?
First, you have to establish trust. Sometimes that can take 5 minutes, other times 5 months. Reflective listening is most effective here - are we on the same page? Is this what you're experiencing?
Once you build trust, I can make recommendations. I am very clear though, why I recommend things. I recommend things not to say, this is the right way. I throw out ideas to see how they're reacting.
Based on their reaction, let's craft a solution that's true and authentic for you.
I’m a catalyst for ideas instead of a script.
When is the right time for someone to seek an executive coach?
There are so many different types of coaches.
There are go-to-market sales coaches where they'll come in and that's going to be 80% of telling you what to do and less about asking questions.
Some coaches are all about asking questions and they will very rarely tell you what to do. That's on a feel-good therapeutic side.
Some coaches are spiritually oriented.
So, think of this as dating.
You first have to go out there and find out what's available. You have to find someone who you actually like. I think of finding a coach, you have to be able to laugh with them and be authentic.
Where can someone find an executive coach?
We have a group of six phenomenal executive CEO coaches and we are starting to collect our own group of referrals as well. At the Mochary Method curriculum, we have a list of coach recommendations for people who happen not to find us a fit.
Another way is through VCs and incubators.
It is all mostly word of mouth.
What is the Mochary Method?
It was founded by Matt Mochary, who's the author of The Great CEO Within. He started coaching for fun and he wanted to be involved in the tech scene. The Great CEO Within is essentially a summary of lots of different business books.
What haven't I asked you that I should have asked you?
It's around a misconception about coaching.
The misconception of being told what to do.
We'll get a lot of inquiries from leaders who say, you know what, I'm done with having coaches who will make me feel good. I want to be told exactly what to do. And I want to be told from people who've done this before.
I want to caution leaders to take a step deeper and to feel why they need things this way. Is it driven by anxiety? Is it driven by fear and imposter syndrome?
Because the most important thing about learning frameworks and knowledge is the filtering inside. What is my leadership style? How would I like to do things? What do I know about my customers and my employees?
You may look at coaching as a silver bullet that will fix everything. I think of the best thing is to learn to be self-sufficient and to believe in yourself to say no matter what the situation is, I'm going to figure it out.