Why a Coach Means Business

Running a business is hard. Especially if you have never done it before.

Now add in crazy uncertainty and remote team members that are going through their own struggles and challenges at home. Even harder.

The decisions you have to make are even more complex and leadership styles need to adapt to support employee well-being (as well as motivation, focus, collaboration, communication, empowerment…and all the other ways you need to show up as leaders to support and develop your teams).

What’s a Founder to do?

Hire a coach. Whether you are scaling up or pivoting, right now it’s a good time to engage someone and build that relationship. It’s lonely at the top.

And, for those concerned with old stigmas, I think we have turned a corner. People (and the media) increasingly understand it is about boosting performance not what you lack or a sign of failure.

Today, more VCs are not only supporting the role a coach plays but also providing the coaching themselves or making the introductions. As someone who worked with investors (hedge funds = ego), I applaud VCs for taking this step. RRE Ventures offers programs for Founders and VP/Director level management. Union Square Ventures offers management trainings. Primary Ventures, too.

The get it. The need their portfolio companies to scale successfully. Yet, they know, that approximately 20% fail in Year 1 and 50% fail within 5 Years.

Ask the Right Questions

Often Founders are too deep in the weeds. The day-to-day is overwhelming and they barely have time to lift their heads. Time to take a moment and reflect on how things are going? How things could be better? Ask themselves what am I missing?

A good coach will ask the right, open-ended questions. Questions that will uncover your blind spots. We all have them. The trick is to identify these blind spots before they impede personal and business growth. Before you go over a cliff you don’t see coming or fail to recognize a rising star on your team.

Maybe it’s the interpersonal stuff (communications or delegation) or maybe it’s leadership development (decision-making or company culture).  Maybe it’s the professional and personal bias we bring to the table and to our decisions.

Elon Musk has said, “A lot of times the question is harder than the answer. If you can properly phrase the question, then the answer is the easy part.”

It’s all about asking the right questions in the right way. This is where my legal training has been invaluable. The law is all about asking the right questions and spotting the issues.

Grow Faster Than Your Business

As you scale, things are moving 100 MPH. Your role as CEO is ever expanding as your business grows. If you haven’t been a CEO before, it’s easy to screw it up.

I often talk about the value of a growth mindset when scaling a business. The belief that with effort and perseverance talent can be nurtured, intelligence fostered, creativity and leadership developed. As a Founder you need to acquire new skills as CEO, a role that is ultimately responsible for strategy, culture, teamwork, hiring and developing managers, and communicating with stakeholders.

Focusing on your growth and learning will help you serve your business better. For example, if you are not great at delegation then you become a bottleneck and slow down productivity. Or, if you avoid conflicts and you have tension in the C-suite that will hurt your ability to make informed and thoughtful decisions, not to mention the tension will trickle down to your teams impacting collaboration. 

Objective Lens

Maybe your business has plateaued whether that’s at $1mm, $10mm, or $100mm. Something isn’t working. Maybe it’s strategy, or team, or culture. You have looked at it and stayed up nights thinking about it, but you can’t figure out what’s wrong.

What worked yesterday no longer works. It’s easy to want to apply the same process, framework, or formulas to new challenges. It’s easy to struggle to identify and frame these new challenges as you scale.

Unless you have a great right hand that is willing to challenge you (and that’s a quality that you should look for in your senior leadership) which is often not the case, you need someone that can look at you and your business through an objective lens. Someone who is not emotionally tied to the outcomes.

A coach will be that sounding board and objective, unemotional lens that you need to see the big picture and the little nuances that get lost in the noise. A coach will help you make quicker and more thoughtful decisions.

Hiring a coach is about performing at the highest levels as a leader and, thereby, creating high-performance teams.