CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

WORKING WITH A COACH

When a member of our board first suggested I work with a coach, I thought it would be a good idea for one reason: to learn how to get people to stop suggesting I work with a coach. A decade later, my coach, Marc Maltz, is one of my most valuable assets and advisers.

CEO coaches come in lots of shapes and sizes. Some are almost therapists, while others are retired CEOs themselves. Some are quiet and lead you to conclusions on your own and some are more in your face. You have to find one that's a good fit with your style, your pace of work and your ability to pay. It's one investment that I wouldn't shortchange as you try to grow your business and your career—even if you have done it all three times before.

THE VALUE OF EXECUTIVE COACHES

We started Return Path in December 1999. Within 10 months, the company hadn't had time to turn into much of anything at all when the great Internet bust happened. We kept grinding forward in 2000 and 2001 and the end of that year had us going through a painful 50/50 merger with our only direct competitor and recapitalizing the company. We were still alive, even kicking but things were not going well.

When one of our board members, Fred Wilson, sat down with me to give me feedback that I could be doing a better job in a few specific ways and perhaps I might benefit from working with a CEO coach, my immediate thought was, “Clearly, the one part of my job that I'm not great at is managing my board, otherwise Fred would know how brilliant I am! Maybe the coach can help me with that.”

Fred introduced me to Marc Maltz from Triad Consulting, who had done some coaching work for other CEOs in his portfolio. I half-heartedly agreed to take an initial meeting and told Marc that I wanted help learning how to manage my board. He politely smiled and said he'd be happy to help with that but that perhaps we could start working together with him doing a 360 evaluation of me; maybe that process would highlight another thing or two to work on besides managing a board.

I grudgingly agreed. I didn't think I had a lot to learn. My upward reviews from my team were really strong, so they clearly liked me. I'd raised money successfully three times, built a strong strategic partnership with the top large player in our industry and convinced a competitor to join forces with us. For Pete's sake, I was the CEO! Didn't that mean I was the boss?

Ah, the arrogance of youth.

Ultimately, I overcame my initial resistance to working with a coach because (1) he was right that I had another thing or two to work on, and (2) he allowed me to come to that conclusion on my own—though he certainly served up the right data to make that conclusion a bit more obvious than it had previously been.

I had to wait for a board member to insist that I work with an executive coach. I urge you to take the initiative here and engage one of your own volition. You absolutely will not regret it.

AREAS WHERE AN EXECUTIVE COACH CAN HELP

I've worked with my coach in many, many different capacities over the years. Here are some examples of the work that he's done with me and my team:

• Coaching me. A good coach helps you review the critical incidents of your day-to-day job by helping you develop the muscles around self-awareness and self-regulation so that you can get to empathy and, ultimately, influence.
• Coaching individuals on my team and my team as a team. My coach has done that same work with others on my executive team as well, helping them raise their game. Equally important is the work he's done with our whole senior team as a team. Marc shows up at each of our quarterly offsites for at least a day to help facilitate the “development” section of the meeting where we look critically at how we're doing and what we need to do differently going forward.
• Learning from instruments and other frameworks. Good coaches, even ones who aren't trained as industrial psychologists, know how to administer some key instruments to help you understand different aspects of your personality and management style. Some of the things we have used over the years include the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument, the Hay Group management style survey, the Action-Design framework for having difficult conversations, and the Signature Themes from Now, Discover Your Strengths. These instruments are only mildly interesting in and of themselves. (It's great that I'm an “ESTJ.” Now what?) The real power in the instruments comes in understanding how to regulate those characteristics and how they match up against the personalities and styles of those around you. That's what a good coach will help you do.
• Critical meeting facilitation. A good coach can help you facilitate critical meetings, like postmortems or even just a tough executive team meeting you may have a hard time chairing because you're also contributing heavily to its content.
• 360 review process. A specific subset of meeting facilitation is running live 360 reviews.
• Organization design. Most CEO coaches, whether or not they have formal training in organizational design, will be good at helping you think through it. If they have been around long enough, they will have seen lots of different models and will be able to help you understand the puts and takes of, say, hiring a COO, or having marketing report to sales.

The impact of all this work is impossible to quantify other than to say that, more than a decade later, Marc is still one of my and the company's most trusted outside advisers. In fact, I give him credit as one of a few reasons we're still in business!