No, it’s not your mother, your spouse or your best friend. They may all understand a part of you. But professionally speaking, in your business, in your career, someone needs to understand you and your context. Someone needs to be the objective observer, and bring those insights forward to enable you improve your operations.
Recently I was at a start-up networking event where the featured guest was George Babu, one of the co-founders of Rypple. When discussing how startup CEOs can be successful, he spoke about hiring coaches. This is what enables the learning and development to happen at a faster pace. Someone that is disconnected from the company makes it possible for the CEO to be unguarded about what they are able to openly talk about. And he sees this as a trend that is occurring in many startup companies. And of course, he himself, now a VC with OMERs also has a personal coach for himself in his new endeavor.
Of course, you may say that this is not something new. When start-up companies are getting off the ground, one of the steps is to recruit advisors. Advisors are selected based on key factors such as: having experience in a similar situation, being subject matter experts, or being customers. This is excellent as long as there is an accompanying focus on you as the leader, and focusing on maximizing your personal effectiveness in undertaking new and different tasks. But that is not a given, as we often see start-up CEOs that are pushed out of the companies they founded, because they were deemed to be ineffective.
Away from the startup scene, we have formal organizations that are put together as peer advisory groups. These are effectively self-help groups, where company leaders can share problems with peers who may have dealt with similar problems and issues. A very nice summary is provided by Rey Carr and his post “Fee-Based Peer Coaching & Peer Mentoring Groups: How Do They Work?”. Again, these appear to provide great benefit for leaders to remove themselves from their own company and ecosystem, and get on neutral ground with other leaders so they can share openly. But how this leads to improved levels of effectiveness seems to be less certain.
And then there is the mentor approach, where a leader may have an open-door to someone who is senior to them and has the wisdom to provide guidance. Certainly this provides another great mechanism for the leader to learn, but only if the mentor can effectively relate to the context in which the company is operating. But this may not be the case. The mentoring scenario could be much like the “Grasshopper” spiritual training in the Kung Fu television show. A lot of great parables, which can get the leader thinking. But may not be there to support the action.
Back to George Babu’s thinking. If you need to be better, you need to bring in coaches. The title itself brings a completely different implication. It implies that someone must get to know you. Completely. And they must know the context within which you operate, the goals you have set for your company, and the obstacles which you face. And from there, you must be pushed and held accountable to the goals that you committed to.