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Leading Organizations That Matter
57. Ted Witherell: Is Now the Time to Consider Executive Coaching?
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Ted Witherell
Foreign.
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Ray Spadoni
Welcome to Leading Organizations that Matter, a podcast about leadership, organizational culture and how we find meaning and purpose in our work. I'm your host, Ray Spadoni and today's topic is Is now the Time to Consider Executive Coaching? Let's say you are at a point of significant change in your life and career. You are facing a difficult decision or situation. You'd like to take your career up to the next level. You feel as though you are facing insurmountable challenges and would like to explore ways to to overcome them. Might this be a good time to consider executive coaching? Today I'm pleased to interview Ted Witherell, who has dedicated more than 30 years to developing leaders and cultures. He is the principal of Ted Witherell Coaching and Consulting and a lecturer on leadership at the Harvard T.H. chan School of Public Health. He works with leaders and teams from mid level management to senior executive level and he specializes in physician leadership. As a business executive, Ted led the talent management function at Mass General Brigham Healthcare System for more than 25 years. In that role, he was a trusted advisor. He provided advice and counsel on executive coaching, change management, team development, training, and leadership development. A couple of highlights from his background that are particularly relevant to today's conversation include he's been a panelist and speaker for forums like Becker's Healthcare Forum and the American College of Healthcare Executives. He served on the Steering committee of the national center for Healthcare Leadership and chaired their Coaching Council. He holds a coaching credential from the icf, the International Coaching Federation, and has completed two additional executive coaching certificate programs. I hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome to the podcast, Ted. Thank you very much for being a guest here.
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Ted Witherell
Glad to be here. I'm excited actually. It's going to be a good conversation.
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Ray Spadoni
Fantastic. So I introduced listeners already to you before we started recording at a high level. But I wonder if you can tell us a little bit about your path to becoming a coach. To becoming an executive coach?
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Ted Witherell
Yes, absolutely. It's really interesting. I think I've always been a coach on one level. My first formal coaching role, I was 14 years old and I was coaching a Little League team with my buddies in high school. I was a track coach for a while. So it's kind of always been there in one level. There are a couple moments. One moment was when I was doing some volunteer work with a Peace Corps organization in Kingston, Jamaica, and I realized that my gift to the world was not going to be as the leader, as the one doing stuff, but the person next to the leader. And what I really Realized was that I was going to do that. I could make that contribution, most likely through some form of counseling and teaching. Those were going to be the two things, and those have been present all the way through my journey. I have a master's in counseling, did some employee assistance counseling. For a period of time. I have been a classroom teacher. I'm a college professor. But really, this counseling and teaching has shown up in lots of various ways, never more poignantly than in coaching. So it was around the 90s when coaching started to become a thing. I got kind of interested in it, did a little bit of research on it, and the more I looked at it, the more I went, ah, so that's what they call it, this thing that I've been doing.
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Ray Spadoni
Interesting.
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Ted Witherell
So then, you know, fast forward. I ran the talent function at Mass General Brigham for about 25 years. And in that space, I kept bringing coaching into it there. Doing coaching, running the internal coaching practice, getting my own certifications. I have a couple of certifications in coaching. I have the ICF credential. And that sort of led me to where I am now, where I have my own practice. So that's the journey.
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Ray Spadoni
Great. Thank you. What do you think exists within you in terms of what makes you tick that drew you to coaching, that drew you to being, you know, in a supportive role rather than the hub around which all the other spokes rotated. You know, you wanted to be supportive of the hub. What is it about you, do you think, that drove you to it?
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Ted Witherell
What a great question. You'd be a good coach. Right? Because coaches ask questions. You know, as I presented in this short snippet that I just gave to you, it sounds so much more clean and clear than it really was or is for me. And certainly I think for anybody, there's always a more of a knitting together in the after, after fact. But I think part of it was really coming to grips with what my gifts were. There was a desire to be the inspirational leader. And I kind of started to realize that I'm not necessarily. It doesn't come naturally to me to be that. I've been in that role, and I've done that, certainly. So one was kind of accepting that then the other was going to that place of like, oh, yeah, but I've always been the one that people trust and want to kind of speak to and sort of gain advice from, but. But, you know, I've always been the one that's curious and really enjoy kind of understanding what's going on for somebody else. And I'M curious and ask the questions. So I think it was really a process of kind of uncovering that, that in myself. And as I said, it was sort of an epiphany kind of early on. And that epiphany kept getting more and more and more clear as I got more and more mature.
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Ray Spadoni
Great. Thanks for answering that, Ted. It gives, it gives us some insight into you and also the kind of person who would become an executive coach. And so when, when some folks hear the term executive coach, they're going to think perhaps that the term itself is sufficiently descriptive. You know, an executive coach coaches executives. Fine. But I am sure that there's more to it than that. Can you provide a description what it is and maybe just as important what it isn't?
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Ted Witherell
Sure, that's great. Yeah, great, Great question. A great place for us to start the conversation. So, a couple of things I think, first of all, I love the fact you kind of put a fine point on executive coaching because there are different kinds of coaching and I won't bore you by getting into that, but I do think, for example, there's a big difference in terms of what happens in and what is visual, what people think of when they think of a quote life coach versus a quote executive coach. Right. And there's a lot of overlap, but I think there's a different difference, primarily in the context that we're talking about. Executive coaching is a type of coaching, but it doesn't necessarily mean only coaching the person who has an executive title. So I say a couple of things. The International Coaching Federation I mentioned a little bit earlier, they're the gold standard. They kind of set the standard for what the field is. So here's a quick sentence from what they say that I think is a good place to start. They talk about partnering with clients in a thought provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. Those are the words. Right. But there's a lot in there and I think, for me, I like to think of it in a metaphor, A road trip. So if I'm coaching you, we're going on a road trip and you get to decide what the destination is. Are we going to go cross country or we're going to just go down to D.C. you get to decide you're driving, you're behind the wheel, and I'm your partner in this. I'm your passenger and you get to tell me, I want you, Ted, as my passenger here. I want you to be on radio duty. I want you to watch for the Police because I tend to speed or I want you to take a nap in the backseat because I got this. So that's the way I kind of think of it. And there are a few ingredients that I think are really, really important in coaching. There has to be a level of inquiry, curiosity, questioning. And I bring that up because I think the temptation for most other forms of related others like this take the form of telling I know something I should tell you. That's what we kind of go to. That's a knee jerk default reaction. Coaching is much more about asking questions that help you discover the truth. I won't go into the brain science band, but there's a lot that basically said that's a much more impactful way of kind of being for you. Now the other thing that a coach does, besides asking the coach helps hold a space for reflecting. If I ask a good question, you need to be able to have the space to be able to unpack what that means. One of the things that I've noticed is a huge deficiency in all the people we work with these days is the time for reflection, the discipline of reflection. I will often ask someone, how do you process inspiration? And most folks don't have a standard kind of way of that. Right. So can coaching create that space? So two ingredients are this notion of inquiry and a notion of reflection. And of course, implicitness is a goal. I have two beliefs around this. One is the 2% belief. That is I believe when I'm coaching you that you are really working on a 2% tweak, not a 98% wholesale remake of who you are. Most of the time when I'm coaching someone, there is some kind of a thing that's holding them back from what they want, what they need to get. And usually that plot takes the form of a strength overplayed. This worked where I was before. Now it's not working where I need to go next. The other belief, I've got to think that it's really important here that I think defines coaching is you have what you need. ICF talks about the person in front of you is creative and resourceful and whole. When I've been least effective as a coach, it's when I've lost sight of that belief, the that you have everything you need. All I'm doing is trying to help you figure that out.
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Ray Spadoni
That's great.
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Ted Witherell
So that's the gist. That's the gist. I'll stop there. I could go on and on, Ray, because I love this coaching stuff. Let me stop There.
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Ray Spadoni
No, that's great. And I will say that anyone who knows me knows that I'm a sucker for a good road trip metaphor. So I use them often myself. But when you mentioned the question, how do you process inspiration? That's very powerful. And I would not be surprised if many of the listeners to this podcast hearing you ask that question or state that as something you like to ask, pause for a moment, and maybe even drift off into trying to answer that question for themselves. I did that myself a little bit, to be honest with you. Other good questions, I want to circle back to that a little later in the interview because I think you're exactly right. It's, you know, the art of asking good questions is. Is a very valuable one. We've looked at this so far, Ted, from the perspective of the coach. Let's look at it from the perspective of someone who might be thinking, hey, maybe I'd like to have a coach. So who's a good candidate for coaching? And maybe even one step further, at what stage of a person's career should someone even consider bringing on a coach in the first place?
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Ted Witherell
Great question. I would. Again, you're good with the questions, Ray. You must be like a podcast host or something.
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Ray Spadoni
I'm sure I dabble. Yeah, you dabble.
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Ted Witherell
Atul Gawande is one of. One of my heroes. Many of your listeners may have heard of Atul Gawande. He writes for the New Yorker. He's a big kind of a thought leader. He's also a faculty member at Harvard Med School and Harvard School of Public Health. He's a surgeon. He's written books. He says that everyone needs a coach. His article called Everyone Needs a Coach really kind of revolutionized the acceptance of coaching in the medical establishment. Basically said, I'm a physician. I'm a surgeon, in fact, and I use a coach. And so that was one example of. And I've seen this happen in various fields where it became okay for folks to ask for a coach, seek a coach, accept coaching where they wouldn't have before. So my first answer is that everyone at any time needs a coach. My second response would be anyone who is worthy of investment. And that's one of the things that we may get to, I'm sure is kind of around. Okay, what are some of the downsides around coaching? What are the pitfalls? Well, coaching is, I'm going to say it's an expensive intervention. And I don't want to kind of overstate that. Right. Because it is an investment. When I was inside running the talent management function. I would have folks say they wanted to get a coach for a person they're about to fire. And that is not a good use of coaching. That person is not coachable. That you're talking about remedial situation here. That's not good for coaching. It's also not worth putting that kind of. If basically the organization is saying, I simply want to show that I'm invested in this person before I fire them, there are a lot cheaper ways to do it. So I think part of it is these are the people we want to invest in. I had a wonderful CFO who once said he talked about leverage. So I want to pay for coaching for anyone for whom there is leverage. In my experience, that falls into a couple of buckets. One is the higher up that someone goes in an organization, the larger their leverage is, right? The more people they impact, the more of the culture they have a say over, etc. So investing there is a really great place. More importantly though, I believe investing in those high potentials, the folks who are earlier in their career who really, really have a place to go, let's invest in them early. Because an investment there can pay dividends for a very long time. That's part of it. I think. The other thing I would say is anyone who is in any inflection point, inflection points are such a valuable point because we are unfrozen, right? Coaching often is about changing the way that we sort of think about something when we are unfrozen. Think about, for example, when you go on that road trip, when you're on vacation, you're unfrozen from a daily routine. You're open to things in a way you wouldn't be otherwise. Also, transitions create a sense of stress. Eustress, not distress. Distress actually kind of brings us down to a lower order thinking. But eustress is actually a great place. It motivates us to alleviate that stress and learn and create. So times of inflection points are really, really powerful. The last thing I'll say around this, the most important thing in terms of figuring out who coaching is for is readiness, is are you ready for it? And I have a whole lot of research and a lot of thesis kind of around readiness that I think is really, really valuable and important to me. It comes down to skill, will and environment. When we look at those are the conditions present in that space for the person to be successful and that willingness speaks to their readiness. Are they ready for this?
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Ray Spadoni
Got it. That's a very helpful way to Frame this up. And I think you keep asking good questions. So that's your Jedi level. Coaching is on full display for the audience. But I'm struck by the question or by the notion of investment. You know, someone who's worthy of investment, and, you know, I, I, I wonder about the inverse of that. If you're someone who's contemplating executive coaching, you have to ask yourself if you are worthy of that investment. The inverse being, well, what does it say if you don't feel you are worthy of that investment? I mean, not to go too deep into, you know, the psychology of this, and I know there's a lot of psychology baked into this, but I think that's a, that strikes me as a first marker, as a sort of the gate. You know, if you feel you're worthy of investment, then proceed. If you don't, maybe time to examine and really probe that a bit.
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Ted Witherell
Great insight. 100% agree. I think that, to me, that speaks to two things. When I was talking about readiness. Right. That's part of it. I have to feel on some level I'm worthy enough. And I think that's one of the challenges right now. Because the challenge in coaching may be my sense of worthiness. And that is, by the way, one of the most common areas of coaching that I engage in with folks. They'll appear and they'll talk about confidence, and sometimes they're so incompetent they won't even be able to kind of really frame it in that way. One of the most common ways that folks come forward is imposter syndrome. And I find this in particular a number of women clients. That's a very common thing that shows up, especially a lot of my physician clients who find themselves in roles of leadership. This notion of imposter syndrome. They'll find out that I'm a fake. And I can go down a list of 20 different clients that I've got who are these amazing, accomplished human beings. As I'm saying, really, you don't see that. Right. But the work is around helping them to come come see that.
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Ray Spadoni
Interesting. You know, the, the, some of the differences, maybe it's between men and women, maybe it's just between different types of folks. But this notion of worthiness and then also confidence in proclaiming your worthiness. I mean, some folks don't struggle at touting their, their accomplishments, and others may have many accomplishments, but they lack the impulse, the confidence, the sense of importance to be able to describe it. Feeling almost as though they are showing off somehow.
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Ted Witherell
Yeah, there's A reconciliation process. And I think you're right. We're speaking to kind of one side of it where it's someone who is obviously not showing up in a confident way. So, for example, I can think of one particular leader I work with who was promoted to vice president level. This is a healthcare person. This particular person was in the HR side of things. And the advice that she got from a female mentor that was super powerful and useful was, say one thing in that executive meeting, just get your voice in there once, mostly for yourself. And that was something that she did in each meeting until she became confident and comfortable and felt she knew the context, et cetera. There's another side to this that I think is really important, Ray, that you bring up. There are folks who come across who are the ones who are taking up all the air in a meeting and speaking and behaving in those ways that seem super confident. And oftentimes, in my experience, when I've done a 360 assessment on someone and give them feedback that's holding them back, they're too confident, they're too brash to do whatever it happens to be. And yet what I find is that most of the time, the root that's underneath that is pretty similar there. There's still that insecurity that. That lack of confidence, whatever it is, that's just how it's manifesting itself differently.
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Ray Spadoni
Right? It's. It's, you know, it's. Not to paint with too broad a brush, but it's the smartest kid in class syndrome of, you know, we. Maybe we all remember the kids in grade school or high school who always had to be the smartest kid in class. And sometimes that betrayed something deeper that maybe was much less secure than it seemed.
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Ted Witherell
I just had a client yesterday I finished up with who I adore. This is a woman who had just been promoted up to a chair role, actually hired in from the outside, all kinds of gifts everywhere. And what you just said, her big aha as we were wrapping up the entire engagement, was exactly that I've learned and realized that I have lived in a way that I always have to be the smartest person in the room. And from this past six months, I have learned that I actually am going to get more, do better, create more, get more of what we all kind of want here. If I don't have to be the smartest person in the room, but I elevate others to be the smartest person in the room. Such a touching and moving revelation for that person to share.
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Ray Spadoni
Love it I know you're a student of leadership styles, but think of the people who, you know, who can convey a smartest person in the room presence without talking all the time. That's a very powerful leadership style. You know, it's the, it's the, when this person speaks, everyone listens phenomenon. Anyways, so coaching, if you do a Google search, you know, if someone says, hey, I think I'd like to find an executive coach, you'll find that there are many people out there who hang a shingle for, for coaching. So if someone has, you know, sort of done the evaluation in terms of investment worthiness, they're at an inflection point. There's a sense of readiness, a feeling of being worthy and so forth. And they're thinking, yeah, I want to do this. How do you find one? How do you get a good one?
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Ted Witherell
To me, there's two parts. There's finding and there's choosing. So the finding. I could speak to that for one second. I think the simplest hint I can give is go to the International Coaching Federation website, the ICF website. They have a clearinghouse. That's a great place to start. There's just so much there, and that is kind of the core body. And I'm not paid by them. There's no affiliation there. These kind of are like the core place. Now, that's not the only place. There are tons of other places, but I found you go there, that'll be a great place to start, to start to uncover some of the other places that one might go to start to kind of uncover coaches. That's a great place to go. I've also found that we tend to underutilize our internal resources. When I worked inside a large organization, and large organizations have this more than smaller ones, that was my job. I would have somebody who would say, I think I need coaching. And I would be able to speak with them and say, do you Right. And kind of have the conversation of what they might really need and if they then really needed coaching. I became kind of an internal coaching practice manager and could help them find a coach. Sometimes that coach might be me, might be one of my staff or somebody external. But oftentimes large organizations have a big organization development function or something sitting somewhere in HR where they have somebody who can help with that. And the other thing I found is a lot of people know somebody. I, I know somebody out there who I think has been coaching. They'll be able to help you and tell you, if all else fails, contact me. We'll leave my Contact information at the end of this. I'm glad you. I spent a lot of my time helping people find coaches and I really enjoy that work.
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Ray Spadoni
Okay.
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Ted Witherell
That's the finding. I think the choosing becomes really important and choosing is really about fit. So it's about talking to a few different people, getting cleared on what it is that I really personally want from my coach. And I have a list of questions that I often will suggest people ask that I would be glad to share with you if you want to put in the notes or whatever. There's a little bit about that too. The discernment process of what it is that I'm going to find is a good fit.
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Ray Spadoni
Perfect. So someone searches, finds, chooses. Can you talk a little bit about, I guess two things, Ted. The first is what does the startup phase look like when things get rolling? What is that like? And then over time, how can someone know if it's going well, if. If they're getting value from this, if they're getting their money's worth?
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Ted Witherell
Yeah, great question. Let me take them, both of them are great. Let me take them one at a time. So for the first one, to simplify it, I would kind of say coaching. I think of it as three phases and you talk about the first one. So the first one is a clarifying phase. That's really what's happening during the beginning. Then there's a working phase and that's kind of. You're just in kind of a groove. Then there's a wrap up phase. In the wrap up phase is really around checking before we wrap up, did we kind of reach the goal that the coachee, the client set what needs to be put in place to be able to continue after coaching is over. I had one person who said that they found me in the back of their head and that's. I don't, I don't wish that on anybody. But so the startup end up, a lot of that really falls on the responsibility of the coach. As a coach, it's my job to structure this so that we move into this engagement. And I've been trained on how to kind of set that up so it's not on the shoulders of the client, even though it is the client's journey. And it takes, it's a few different things. First of all, it's kind of about building trusts. So I'll often do some things in the beginning like, hey, can you answer these 10 questions? Just write it out about your life and who you are and your family, etc. So a little bit of you know, building the trust and getting to know each other a little bit. Where to go, where not to go.
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Ray Spadoni
In conversation or in writing in advance.
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Ted Witherell
Todd, whatever works. I will, I will ask my folks, would you mind filling this out and sending it back to me ahead of time? And if you do mine and you don't want to, no worries. We'll just talk about it. Right? And most folks do submit it in writing, but I've had lots of folks who said, I want to actually talk this through with you first. Either way is completely fine. So once you've kind of had that getting to know you, I start pushing pretty hard right away. And let's set some goals. The goal setting doesn't take place in one conversation, one meeting. They sort of evolve over a short period of time. But we need to begin thinking about that right away because as Yogi Berra said, if we don't know where you're going, any road will get you there. At least I'm going to attribute that to Yogi Berra. But so the idea of kind of starting to get clear on goals and then there's some data gathering, I believe very strongly in data gathering. I believe if we're talking about behavior change, which is what really is at the core of coaching, I personally am not going to change my behavior unless I have some data and information that kind of goes against some of the things that I'm holding onto really tightly. So a 360 assessment that gathers information and input from people all around me, above, below, my peers, my customers. So we've established the working relationship. We have set some preliminary goals, we've gathered some data, we then locked in the goals. Then with formal executive coaching, then there's usually a conversation with the boss. Now, one last thing I want to really emphasize here is that everything that goes on in coaching is confidential. So we may be having this three party meeting with the boss, but you know, if you and I are working together, we spend a lot of time preparing for that. So you are deciding what from this assessment, what from your goals, what from our conversations you want to bring forward and what you don't. And then, you know, I am. And we are both kind of adhering to that. And that lets us now start working on the actual kind of work of the coaching from there, that oftentimes takes several months to kind of go through all that process.
- [26:55]
Ray Spadoni
Is that common that you will engage a person, a person's boss or others within the organization? And the reason I ask that is because I would imagine that sometimes you're working with clients whose objective is to leave a job or to elevate in another, you know, position in another company, in which case confidentiality is doubly important.
- [27:19]
Ted Witherell
Absolutely, absolutely. And that's, that's pretty common. I'll tell you what my CFO once said. My CFO who was paying for a coaching program for basically it was part of a leadership program where all of his managers got, got a certain amount of coaching and then some got deeper coaching. And his, what he said was life's too short. That was his line. He basically said, some of you as a result of this are going to have an aha that says I need to leave this organization because I'm just not happy here or I need to go leave this organization and pursue my long lost hobby. Whatever. Life's too short, you need to do that. And his thinking was in aggregate, it's kind of a win win because if you are in a place where this is not the right place for you and you're deciding to go somewhere else, that's actually a good thing for you and for the organization when it comes down to it. And most people won't. So I think there's something in that. And what I've also found, I have one client in particular who's in a very hard, untenable position and has a job offer outside. And what we've been able to do in the coaching is to look at his current job as if it's a job offer and the other job is being offered and really kind of do some comparing back and forth. So it does come up. And in the meeting with the manager, you know, I will say to my folks, you're going to have to share something with your boss that is compelling and they're going to have some say in, in that. But you may have a one or two goals like that, maybe have one or two that are just hours inside the coaching, you know as well. And that's, that's okay as well. But it's important to bring the boss in. It's a best practice. Research shows that when you evaluate the efficacy of coaching that the coach of course rates it like 98%. Of course we're effective. The client tends to rate it 95 or better, tend to rate it really, really high. And then the boss tends to rate it in the 70s and that's gotten much better since. The best practice of involving the boss and in particular if you think about the boss, in essence is sort of sponsoring and paying for this. On the flip side, it's also in the best interest of the client because the boss has a lot of control. Remember I said skill, will, environment. The boss has a lot of control over the environment. I recently had a three party conversation with a client and the boss where I as the coach pushed pretty hard on the boss and their responsibility of creating conditions for success in the environment that the client could not do themselves. And that became a pretty powerful moment for both of them.
- [29:35]
Ray Spadoni
Interesting. So it's, it's, it's coach as broker, facilitator, intermediary, in effect, all the above.
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Ted Witherell
Yes. The way I like to think of it is we're going into this prepared and the client, it's their meeting and they're running it and they're leading it, but it's a new kind of meeting. So, so it's, it sets up a different dynamic. For example, one of the defaults that often happens with my clients is they'll be working on business related goals. I'm going to improve profits, I'm going to improve engagement. All critical and important, really important stuff. And we can kind of get to that when we talk about the evaluation of efficacy of coaching. But as important as that is, the coaching is about the development of that individual to achieve those goals. And what oftentimes happens is the boss and the employee are working on that goal and not the development of the employee. So me being there, I'm watching for that and, and trying to bring about that kind of conversation and yes, like you said, brokering it. If there are things that either party needs to be sharing or telling the other person that are really important and it's not coming out, I'm trying to help that come along because coaching takes place in a context and what I'm trying to do is help make sure the context is going to be as fertile as possible.
- [30:52]
Ray Spadoni
There's several questions that pop into my mind from, from that, let's go to the funding one. First you mentioned, you know, quote, it's the boss who, who is paying for it. Is that typical that an organization will pay for coaching or is it more typical that an individual pays themselves for themselves?
- [31:10]
Ted Witherell
I would say it's more common that the organization pays, but I have clients that fit in both spaces. I have one in particular who we're just beginning to talk about. In fact, what I love was this person said I'm looking for coaching. And I said okay, let's talk about me as one of, as a coach for you, but let me also offer you two other names to go talk to. So as we were having our conversation, one of the questions came up of like, okay, who's going to pay for this? And this person kind of said, okay, I feel that I need to pay for this because it's my own career development and I want to be able to feel like I'm working on deciding if I want to leave this place or not. I, I don't feel like that's right to ask my organization to pay for that. That's one line of thought. Right? And this person then was going to be able to engage more fully in coaching as a result of that. So I have a lot of that. I have a lot of people who for various reasons say I'm going to be a self pay, I can't get my organization to pay for it, et cetera. There's a lot of different reasons. I typically tend to try to offer a different arrangement for them because it's harder for an individual to pay. So are there ways I can kind of help them with that? But more often it's the organization, the organization says I've got a high potential, I've got a, you know, or we believe very strongly in coaching. We have a strong coaching program. And those I find are very, very effective. Because if an organization is very behind coaching, there tends to be what I call a coach friendly organization, a coach friendly environment. And when you've got that, there's a lot of things in place that go beyond coaching that create sort of an all boats rise sort of environment.
- [32:43]
Ray Spadoni
Excellent. Are there ever any ethical considerations in terms of, you know, follow the money in terms of where the primary interests lie. So if a company is paying, then the company is the client and therefore you would think that you'd be wanting to serve their interests. But if you are coaching an individual and there may be a divergence of interests, what do you do then?
- [33:11]
Ted Witherell
Yeah, it's a great question. And I go all the way back to my days as an employee assistance counselor where confidentiality was, was, you know, almost legality. Right? It was almost, you know, like. So confidentiality is the, the coin of the realm. It's critical on all different levels. And coaching is a coach engagement is only as good as the contract that it is that is written about it. Right. So there's contracting that is part of the opening phase. Contracting includes, okay, what are the limits of confidentiality? What does that mean? Where are they limited? Confidentiality is always limited ethically if someone is going to be a harm to themselves or others. So at one point, for example, I had a person who was really having. Beginning to have some pretty severe mental health issues. And it became very, very clear this is impacting their work. Of course, with their permission, I then began to reach out and work with others in your organization to help them get the mental health support that they needed. So in a sense, you could say, I quote, broke confidentiality, but. But I did it in a way that, that I thought was very sort of respectful. Right. And with their permission. Right. But more importantly, what you're kind of talking about is navigating and negotiating the confidentiality with both parties. So if I'm going to engage with the organization, need to be able to say, look, you have to respect that, that coaching is not going to work if it is not confidential. I have to be able to speak with this person. They have to be able to speak freely inside that space. Now then let's negotiate. Then what you need. And most of the time where it lands on is like, I need to know they're working on at least a couple of goals that are going to, you know, make them more valuable this organization or add value to the organization, you know, et cetera. And so let's look at what those. Those are. Most of the time, what we do is we negotiate an action plan that's usually in writing and that is oftentimes public. And I'm doing this with air quotes. Public, in that the boss sees it. Maybe there's someone in HR who's managing the coaching practice that sees it. Right. But, but so we're talking about it on that level and then some checkpoints. So I talked about meeting with the boss up front, so there's some alignment. Okay, I want to work on these two things. The boss says, okay, this makes a lot of sense. Now let's talk about what support you need. And then also, as we get toward the end, we're about to get to the end here. Have we kind of met, you know, have we met the goals? Are we going where we need to go? I just recently worked with a client, for example, whose goal was to become a vice president. And they reported up to a chief medical officer. And so we had this really good agreement and several three party meetings where it was always kind of about what else needs to happen in order for you to feel like this person is now ready to be promoted to vice president. So there's a lot of work in there. And at the same time, inside that coaching engagement, there's a little bit of, what if I don't get the vice president role? What will I do then? Can that be part of our coaching, you know, kind of thing. So anyway, I'll stop there because I'm starting to kind of ramble here, Ray, but it's such a great question and you can tell it's not a, not a simple easy answer, but it really boils down to the power of the agreement and the contract up front.
- [36:13]
Ray Spadoni
Got it? Well, I guess like all contracts, the more you can anticipate and clarify up front, you know that the better off you'll be down the line. Is there such a thing, Ted, as the. The most typical things that people work on in coaching? You know, a top couple list of the issues that are most prevalent in your practice and in the typical executive coaches practice?
- [36:38]
Ted Witherell
Yeah, I would say navigating a new role is super, super common. Whenever we have a bend in the pipeline, kind of going down the management road, if you will, three things change. One of them is the way we think about the skills. So a new set of skills are required. The second is kind of the things I value in this new role. What should I be valuing now that I didn't value before? These things that may even be beyond my. I don't know what I don't know. Right. And the third is around time. I have a different relationship with time in the time horizon. In my last role, maybe I had to think a week out because I had to set the schedule for Everybody. But a CEO has to think 10 years out. So there's a lot of adjustment and it's the what got you here won't get you there. So a lot of work I find goes in that place. What was it that was working for you before? That may be a strength overplayed and be holding you back. That's a real common one and that's a really fruitful place to be. That's a value to everybody because coaching can accelerate the onboarding and effectiveness in that role. It can take months out of the amount of time it takes, which is of value to everybody. Another one we mentioned before, it's that imposter syndrome, the confidence, space and place. Most folks experience that in some way, but how is that holding you back? How is that? Is it just a sense of internal duress that you want to sort of get rid of or is it actually preventing you from taking steps and doing things that you might need to do otherwise? And as I mentioned before, that is one that shows up across the board for folks, you know, everywhere, especially folks who show up in sort of high level roles, especially in, I'll say, kind of highly hierarchical positional organizations. Healthcare is one of them, you know, industries, and I think oftentimes shows up in women. It's more common in women that they'll bring it forward to work on it. Some of that, in my experience, is that it's my women clients tend to be more at home with acknowledging that in a lot of ways as well. But those are some of the key ones that I work with a lot.
- [38:36]
Ray Spadoni
Okay, great. Well, you alluded to this a few minutes ago, this notion that we all exist within a specific context. And it's. You know, our context is based on our history, our experiences, our values, and of course, the organizational culture that within which we're operating. In your experience, what conditions need to be present for coaching to be successful in any given context or culture?
- [39:06]
Ted Witherell
The first thing I'm going to go back and double down on is readiness for the individual receiving the coaching. They just simply have to be ready. And the context, the environment, has a big impact on that. Of course, if I'm working in an environment where I don't feel safe to explore in these kinds of things, then coaching isn't even going to get off the ground in the beginning. But the individual has to be ready. And one of the things that I've been working a lot as I look at readiness, I once had a mentor who's a wonderful coach who kind of said. I asked the question, like, why is it that coaching works sometimes and it doesn't other times? And he said, readiness. It comes down to readiness. For me, that's not quite good enough. How do we think about readiness? How do we define readiness? What is it? How do we know if someone's ready and how do we bring it about? And the last one, how do we bring it about? A lot of that resides in the culture and the environment. So that's. I think, one. Another thing that I found really powerful is having a champion or a sponsor of power somewhere in your organization. And when I say power, what I'm really kind of talking about is someone who is recognized, right? Whether because they're charismatic or because they hold the purse strings. I mentioned my CFO client who I had before. This was a really good, strong advocate that I had, Someone who really can kind of say, no, this is normal, this is good, this is expected. And it's very easy to take coaching and have it become something that is viewed as punitive. It's very easy for that to happen. Very hard to build a climate and a culture where it's viewed as something that's Positive. I once ran a coaching program internally as part of a leadership development program. All the managers in the department got a coach for a short period of time through this process. Then we offered a follow on coaching as part of it. That was something else that this particular sponsor said. This is so important. I wanted to continue to be part of it. What started to happen was people saw the coaches arriving to coach someone they know had been to the program a year earlier and they said, what's wrong with that person? And you start to see it kind of erode a little bit. So we had to kind of keep being vigilant about. No, coaching is an investment, it's a resource, it's a good thing. And it helps to have a sponsor that can kind of do that. And then the last thing I would say is I just think that all the things that make a good culture, oftentimes measured by employee engagement, for example, all the things that go into that trust and senior leadership development is okay. A tolerance for a certain level of experimentation and mistakes. All those things that make a good environment in general also make a good coaching environment. And it's symbiotic. If you have a lot of folks who are experiencing all those things that make for good coaching outcomes, you're also improving the environment.
- [41:33]
Ray Spadoni
That's great. Perfect fit to a recurring theme in these interviews that I've been doing on the podcast is this notion of culture, transforming culture, improving culture, changing culture and so forth. Speaking of which, maybe more broadly, I know we've been talking about individual one on one coaching. Do you work with groups? Do you work with larger, you know, departments, divisions, entire companies? I mean, is, is there a global version of this?
- [42:03]
Ted Witherell
Yeah, so it's a, it's a really well put, the way you said it. So there's the way I look at it. Let's simplify for our conversation, let's look at three levels. There's the individual coaching, which we've been talking about. There's team based coaching, which has become a discipline in of itself. And then there's this larger, let's just call it global for a moment, organization, or kind of wherever you put it. Starting with that last one, we kind of just began to delve into that just a little bit. Right. You know, how can we think about coaching as a very powerful intervention that is going to help us with our culture? So a lot of what I worked on when I was internal was thinking about how can we, how can we think about coaching as one of the tools that we use and how can we use it in a cost effective investment way. Let's make sure that we, for example, that we are not paying for coaching in one offs all over the organization. Let's centralize it so we know how much money we're spending on coaching, where we're spending it and who we're spending it on, and that we're spending it in places where it has high benefit. And if there are other interventions that might be more appropriate, that we're using those. Right. So on that level, there's a way of looking at it that way. And so that's part of what I spent time internally doing is really looking at how can we use this powerful intervention in a way that's going to be really impactful. We've talked a little bit about individual coaching. All of what we're talking about is really predicated on that. And what has started to happen over the last 10 years, certainly even longer, I suppose has been folks have said, okay, I see the power in this intervention. This is really powerful, let's use this. But it's super expensive if you think about it one after another. How do we think about it at scale? And that's when group coaching began to come into play. Or team coaching is what's being called. To me, it's a different thing. The core of coaching around space for reflection, building a trusting environment, asking good questions, all that stuff applies. But I'm also an expert facilitator and I bring all those things to facilitation as well. Right. So I think there's a lot of overlap from that perspective. What we're starting to see happen now with certifications and with structure coming around team coaching, is it starting to become its own thing where what you're also doing is in addition to all those best practices, you're also leveraging the individuals who are part of that to kind of coach each other. So I see it as super, super powerful. And I see there's a slight difference between team coaching and individual coaching. So that if you're going to use one or the other, you know, really kind of know what you're doing versus I can get more bang for my buck if I do team coaching. For folks know that it's a little bit different than team, than individual coaching.
- [44:37]
Ray Spadoni
Okay. I'm sure that's a very important distinction. I want to, I want to switch to some of the questions that you like to ask folks. You already mentioned how do you process inspiration as a good question. And I'm sure you have others. I think it would be Interesting for listeners to hear those questions so that they can evaluate whether or not these are the kinds of questions they want to answer, but also just for them to maybe begin pondering themselves for their own careers. This podcast is aimed mostly towards leaders of organizations. And so what are some of the kinds of questions you like to ask leaders?
- [45:22]
Ted Witherell
So how many days you got right? You know, one of the things, one of the things that I've worked really hard on trying to do is build up kind of a back pocket reserve of questions because, you know, some work, some don't, and some work for some people, and some don't for some people. So I offer a variety, but one, they became particularly valuable, especially in the really in the core. Like when Covid was really upon us and was really, we were all in the grip of it, there was a whole coaching seminar that was all on the single question of how are you? Simply how. And if you truly ask that question in the context of a coaching relationship where you build trust, etc. And you really mean it. I did this just the other day with a particular client and it turns out the client didn't get fired, but just got sort of moved in a way that feels good emotion. And that question of how are you? Was such a powerful moment. It led to really this deep back and forth kind of exchange. So how are you, if you really mean it, is a really useful, powerful question.
- [46:19]
Ray Spadoni
Well, we're all, you know, multi layered onions. I guess the question is, you know, at what depth do you want to answer that question?
- [46:26]
Ted Witherell
Exactly. And that's the client's choice, right? And as coach, I, you know, I'm always going with their road trip. So if the client in this particular case, they went real deep, you know, another case, you know, I had, you know, a client who's like, I am doing great. I just had a vacation. Can I tell you about my kids? You know, so. So, you know, it goes where they go, but it's a diagnostic as well. Lets me kind of get a feel for where they are so I can start to kind of match and move into their space. That's great. Another one I love in the beginning of an engagement, I use this sometimes, especially when I'm kind of playing. Feeling playful is okay. What's one good thing that's happened this week? And so that's when I'm feeling playful, when it's sort of fun, when it seems like it might be useful for them, sometimes that's useful too. When I got a sense of they've been fighting a Lot of battles. I have one person who just moved into a new role as a chair, and every week she just felt like she was just fighting battles on every front. So I kind of started there. And she laughed was the first thing she did. She said, wait, I got to think about this for a minute. So that's another one that I like. Some questions, too, as we get a little bit deeper into a conversation. And I can see in particular, if a person's beginning to ramble a bunch to me, that says there's some clarity that's not there for them. There's something they're working on here, what's going on? So then I'll sometimes ask a question. I may even have to interrupt and ask a question and say, what do you really want in this situation? And that oftentimes is a pattern interrupter and kind of helps them get where they need to go. There's something I'll ask not as frequently because it can. I think oftentimes it can be unless there's a deep bond of trust, it can feel like a salesman y question, like, what's going to take it to put you in this car today? So I will only ask this if the environment is right. But I'll ask, like, if you have what you needed, if you had this particular thing in this situation you're saying you don't have. Whatever happens, I'll name their words. But if you had this, what would you do? Or if you had this, what would be possible for you? Or if you had this, how would things be different for you? If someone's not ready for that question, it's an awful question. But if someone's ready for that question and they're kind of ready to go to that place, oftentimes it comes when they're sort of sick of the limitation that they find themselves in. So I think those are a few. I guess one other that I will oftentimes ask is simply the why not question. Someone once asked that of me when I was talking low of myself. Of course, I never do this and this and this. Why not? Why not you. Well, and the answer might not be that I should do that thing, but this idea of at least kind of go into this place of answering why not? There's something in the power of answering that question. So those are a few. What I'm looking for more is questions that are going to help put the burden of discovery on them, as opposed to me holding it and saying, I'm going to ask a question that's going to lead you down a path to come to a certain kind of insight. I really want to have questions that are going to help you kind of get to a deeper realization than you may have had before.
- [49:12]
Ray Spadoni
Okay, last question. How are you? No, I'm kidding. What's your biggest challenge in doing?
- [49:22]
Ted Witherell
You are very coachable, by the way.
- [49:25]
Ray Spadoni
You know, I'm following here, but what's, you know, when you've been doing this for a while, what challenges you and what sometimes is difficult about this work?
- [49:37]
Ted Witherell
Yeah, I mean, such a good question. I think for me, a lot of it comes down to how I show up. I guess kind of the headline, how I show up. So, for example, literally during any course of any given day, I'm like most of us where I overbook myself. I have too many meetings and that means that I'm getting exhausted. I may not be showing up in a particular meeting for a client. And I mentioned some of the challenges some of my clients face. And if I'm going to, I need to be able to show up for them. So am I building in enough time to be able to ground myself and make sure I'm showing up as really the client deserves? That's one challenge. I'm always challenging myself around that. Another is there's a notion that one of my mentors once said, never work harder than your client. And I've done that on a lot of occasions. And that's a challenge I face. And oftentimes it's motivated by a bunch of different things. My own imposter syndrome. Right. And it may very well be. I know this organization is expecting this particular meeting to happen, and I'm going to have to answer to the HR VP who's paying me for this engagement. Therefore, this client has to do this when the client isn't ready for this or that, it's not what's best for the client, etc. And so having to kind of slow my role a little bit and say, no, no, no, I'm going to be meeting the client where the client's at, getting over invested. You know, I just like, you know, I just, I get. So I. One of my clients came through fairly recently. I alluded to them before the person who was looking for this VP role, this coaching was about getting ready for the VP role. And when the camera came on, on their badge now it said vice president on their badge, I got all excited and you know, your listeners can't, can't see, but I just wiggled in my chair, right? But I got so excited and you know, that's that's on its surface, that's a really good thing, you know, to be. To be that, you know, connected and invested. But it can take a toll if I'm overly invested in their success. You know, one am I not showing up in a way that's helping them to kind of go where they need to go, where they're ready to go. But more importantly for my own well being, you know, I found, especially when I have clients who are really struggling, I have one in particular right now who is wrestling with resilience. This is someone who is in an organization that's gone through tremendous change. You know, you sort of talk about the, the waterfall, right? This person's like sitting on the edge of that waterfall with their organization and being the one to give them certainty. A lot of our conversation has been around that's really not the right move. Certainty is not something that anyone can give. And certainly that's not even necessarily an expectation that's helpful for anyone right now. And so this person has been kind of wrestling with that. And I've been seeing their resilience erode and I've been feeling it myself for them. And I've had to really do some work to pull back. And this is their journey and I can help them better with their journey if I can sit with my feet on solid ground, you know, and have them, have them kind of be floating out there. So those are a few of the things that I wrestle with.
- [52:27]
Ray Spadoni
That's great. I mean, it's, you know, this notion of potentially becoming over invested is, is interesting. It's the, it's the therapist, chaplain, you know, caregiver in general conundrum and the need for some healthy separation and, you know, it sounds as though coaches experience the same dynamic.
- [52:48]
Ted Witherell
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.
- [52:52]
Ray Spadoni
What surprises you? I mean, you know, again, you've been doing this for a while. Are there any lessons learned that you'd like to share or surprises, things that come up that keep this fresh and new and help you to continue to learn and feel motivated.
- [53:12]
Ted Witherell
I love that Laster twist you put on this. Such a great way to think about this. And I think for me and for everyone I know as a coach, we are always seeking that. Right. This idea of like, okay, coaching could become very rote. I have had times when I've had allowed myself to take on too many clients and if it gets too rote, then it's not good for anybody. So fortunately for me, there is a ton inside my coaching. Almost every single meeting. I'm surprised by well, for example, especially early on in my coaching by some of my own biases. Times when the notion that the person in front, that 2% rule, the person in front of me has what they need, that they are creative, resourceful and whole. When I really uncovered that, I'm not letting myself believe that around this person, for whatever reason, I have one client, I had a very unfair bias. This is a person who was working in government and I had a number of other clients from the same department that they were having a really hard time. All of them, to a person kind of said, yeah, it's terrible and it's really hard, but I'm 15 years away from pension, I'll just stick it out. And so I had this sort of image that I imbued with this one client who was like, I am so much worth so much more than this. And this person surprised me and she shouldn't have, you know, like she really shouldn't have. Like I should have seen this client has this resilience and this gift, et cetera. So I've been surprised in that way. I've been, I think, oftentimes surprised just at the pure joy that I feel in two ways. The pure joy that I felt with being next to people that are. Remember I said before that I'm not necessarily going to be the leader, but I can be next to one. I have had the privilege of coaching some folks that are just absolutely amazing human beings. I'll give one example of somebody who is just really going to be somebody relatively early, getting to mid career, someone who was really well respected in infectious disease. And. And then along came Covid and this person's gifts shined during that time and they exploded to the system level, in their system, to the state level and started to move national. And so to me, what was kind of surprising, what keeps me going, is the joy that I feel at being able to be connected to in any way, shape or form, someone with those kind of gifts. And then the thought partnership. I get so much joy out of just being able to think with really smart people. And there's two in particular that are coming to my mind right now. Both of them have to be physicians. One's working in pharma right now, but just we start and five minutes in and we are in this place of such incredible depth that I would never have gone to had it not been being connected this person in their thought process. And then the last thing I'll say is kind of a more negative thing. And this is, I think I've Been surprised, especially lately, witnessing the limitations of what I said before about the person in front of me is creative and resourceful and whole. I've seen the limits of that. And, you know, in some ways there's some shame with that. Right. Because as a coach. No, no. Every individual is creative, resourceful and whole. I've seen some people arrive not being whole, being really, really in such a less than whole place because of the environment, the world, you know, even going back to Covid. Right. Just there's so many things that are going on and the speed that folks are finding themselves in. I'm just finding folks really wrestling more so I think in the last few years than I have ever seen before. That surprised me a little bit, the amount of difficulty these incredibly gifted people have in just being resilient and showing up each day.
- [56:39]
Ray Spadoni
It's interesting. I mean, I'm hearing a lot in your response to that, that this is very energizing for you, very rewarding for you. But also on that last point, I mean, it sounds to me as though the executive coaching, coaching in general role is one of accompaniment. And that means, you know, you. You are accompanying individuals through the various hills and valleys of their own experience. And as you just pointed out, there have been some valleys that you've. That you've walked alongside folks through.
- [57:11]
Ted Witherell
Yeah, yeah, really well put. Kind of going back to earlier, some of the challenges. Right. Then being resilient when walking through that, because it doesn't help me, but certainly it also doesn't help the other person. Doesn't help the coach. It. Yeah.
- [57:25]
Ray Spadoni
Fantastic. The title of this episode has been Is now the Time to Consider Executive Coaching. So I'm hoping that listeners who may be thinking about this will have learned quite a bit. I think this has been a good overview, maybe for some a real introduction, but also some really surprising and probing thoughtful questions and issues have come up. So I'm grateful to head for your willingness to share all that and for the work that you do. So thank you very much.
- [57:56]
Ted Witherell
Thank you, Ray. Thanks for including me and thanks for the conversation. You and I fortunately get to sometimes have conversations outside of this, and they always feel like this to me. So thank you.
- [58:06]
Ray Spadoni
Yeah, well, we've. We've taken it and we've recorded it for all the world to share and listen in on. And if people want to learn a little bit more about you, what you do, you very generously offered to help folks if they would like to discern this further and maybe find a good coach. How can people find you out there in the, in the vast world that we live in.
- [58:28]
Ted Witherell
Yeah, no, thank you for that. And I really do mean that, you know, I imagine you don't have too many listeners. Just kidding. But no, I really do mean that. And so yes, if folks want to contact me, LinkedIn is probably the best way. Ted Witherel Interestingly, I'm really one of the only Ted Witherells out there, interestingly enough. So finding me on LinkedIn and my email, my email is tedwitherellmail.com and you know, certainly if you want to put those both in the show notes, but I do welcome if folks want to reach out to me by email, I will help in any way that I can that seems appropriate to you. So that's, that's where to find me.
- [59:05]
Ray Spadoni
Fantastic. Thanks again, Ted.
- [59:07]
Ted Witherell
Thank you, Ray.
- [59:08]
Ray Spadoni
Thanks for listening. I hope you'll consider leaving a five star review on Apple Podcasts or your platform of choice that will help others find us here. My mission is to help empower organizations that matter by supporting those who lead them. Feel free to learn more about me and my work@redsaleadvisors.com.
- [59:41]
Ted Witherell
SA.