More and Better Executive Coaches Needed
“Teams of people who subordinate individual performance to that of the group will generally outperform teams that don’t. The trick, then, is to corral any such ‘team of rivals’ into a community and get them aligned in marching toward a common goal.”
Trillion Dollar Coach
By Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg & Alan Eagle
To balance their teams’ creative and performance-oriented tensions, and to mold their teams into small communities, startups often need an executive coach. That’s someone who will not only work with individual team members but also with specific business units or sub-teams to smooth over any rough spots in order to strengthen and reinforce that desired sense of community, and to nurture teamwork that’s align around a common vision and shared set of goals.
More specifically, executive coaches can help in a number of ways, including helping staff members to:
Sharpen their focus on achieving their goals and professional objectives
Clarify and prioritize their job duties
Increase their self-awareness
Gain greater situation awareness
Offer outside experience and other different perspectives
Unlocking their potential in narrow or broad ways, and
Act as a sounding board
Given the growth in angel-funded, seed-stage companies, VC-backed firms, ‘unicorns’, and IPOs, many executive coaches – especially good ones – are overworked and spread too thin across their client companies. The simple fact is that we need more executive coaches.
When an executive coach is called in, she or he usually refrains from giving specific business, legal, financial and other advice. The executive coach also refrains from solving their clients' personal problems. Those things fall outside of the executive coach’s assignment. Instead, what’s ‘in-scope’ is bolstering operational execution, whether that’s focused on one staff member, or across a broader team.
Typically, executive coaches are seasoned executives or business professionals who possess deep domain expertise, or trained professionals who specialize in working with executives or high-potential managers. Most are neither trained therapists or psychologists.
Executive coaches are not company advisors or mentors. They do not have fiduciary responsibilities, such as those that a company’s Board members have. Nor do they have financial incentives like investor do – angel, VC or otherwise. They are not cheerleaders.
Typically, after a financing an angel investor (often with an executive background), VC or strategic investor will suggest to the CEO, founders, or members of the executive leadership team that an individual or team should work with an executive coach. The goal being to tap outside support in order to help an individual executive’s – or the team’s – full potential. Another role for an executive coach is to help shape the team as the company scales. In these cases, the executive coach is called in to help meld together newly and significantly expanded teams.
But then the question arises: When is it not appropriate to hire an executive coach? Here are some thoughts:
When the executive(s) firmly believes that they do not need coaching; they are not interested in feedback, and believe they do not need to change. In addition, when the executive(s) is seeking someone to solve their business problems. (In that case, they are looking for a business advisor or consultant).
Or, when there’s many things inside the company that need fixing: a “Hail Mary” financial situation, a real problem involving investors or the Board (or both), an absence of product-market fit, or a massive competitive or IP issue. Other non-starter situations include when investors are executing a “CYA” strategy relative to a failing executive, when coaching is aimed at the wrong level (usually lower in the org chart), or when there’s an HR issue or psychological problem as opposed to an executive management coaching situation.
Those situations notwithstanding, there are innumerable business situations out there where help from an executive coach would be appropriate and valuable. Consider the following stats:
According to the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), there were 4,859 angel/seed deals completed in 2020, representing 42% of total deals in 2020. Counting all types of funding rounds, 10,862 venture-backed companies received $164 billion in 2020, the third consecutive year more than $130 billion has been invested. The 103 venture-backed IPOs representing $222 billion in exit value in 2020 marked the highest annual exit value on record.
Nobody is perfect, so all startup executives and leaders have areas in which they could use some improvement, or blind spots that they could eliminate with the help of an executive coach. It’s clearly a burgeoning need, but how should the industry go about improving its executive coach ‘bench strength”?
Given the background and requirements of executive coaches, business schools could easily rise to the opportunity and offer executive coach coursework and certification programs. Doing so would add a dimension of rigorousness that’s presently lacking in this area.
However we go about it, our industry will need more and better executive coaches in the future, so let’s start facilitating their development today.
One housekeeping note: Given the holiday-shortened week, we’re taking a brief break. Please watch for out next post in early-December. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!