I hired an executive coach the same month that I hired a doula. As it turned out, these were pretty similar tasks. So, I thought it might be helpful to share some reflections about how I approached this process and a couple of questions that might help you, too.
First off, let’s start with some basics.
What Are They?
Executive Coach: Someone who coaches career professionals on their personal and professional development. Often, they serve as a “mirror” to their clients, reflecting back on themes or ideas that might be hard to see for yourself.
The Goal: Help you identify areas of self-awareness, identify any blindspots, and coach you through behavioral changes to help you “level up” your leadership skills.
Doula: Someone who coaches women through the process of giving birth. They stay by your side throughout the entire process of labor and delivery, offering a mix of coping mechanisms, motivation, and hands-on techniques until the baby is born.
The Goal: Help you and your partner manage through all of the sensations and stages of giving birth, including navigating relationships with the hospital or medical system.
How Coaches & Doulas are Similar:
- They are both *really* up in your personal business.
I can think of few other professions where you hire someone with the explicit task of seeing you at your best and at your worst. Exec coaches have a penchant for asking just a few more personal questions than you might feel comfortable answering, stripping away your “professional mask” and leading to a level of vulnerability that might feel foreign to you in a work context. And doulas will quite literally see everything…the way you contort your body in discomfort, the fluids you excrete from multiple orifices, the tears you shed. They may hold the unique honor of being one of the few people on the planet who may ever hear you moo like a cow in pain. Given all this, trust in both relationships is paramount to your mutual success. - There’s a spectrum of philosophies.
Like any people-centric profession, there’s a wide range of approaches. You might speak with coaches that insist on mindful meditation or poetry readings at the start of each session, or with coaches who ask you to create a “business plan” for your personal development that they hold you accountable for. One doula I interviewed would only agree to work with me if I committed to meeting with her on a weekly basis for the four months leading up to my birth so we could form a stronger spiritual connection and bond. As a result of these gradients, the “personality fit” is key in both contexts. - Both relationships require work on your end.
Yes, you are hiring someone to help you execute a task (“help me be a better leader” or “help me get this baby out!”), but neither one can do that work alone. With exec coaching, you need to be willing to be open-minded in your approach to professional development, challenge your own assumptions, and practice some new behaviors. Similarly, at the end of the day, no matter who else is in your hospital room, you are the only one who can push that baby out of your body. In both contexts, friction develops if you fight against your coach’s methods or practices too much. In other words, you need to first want their help in order to benefit from their help. It’s a two-sided street.
Interview Questions for Your Exec Coach (or Doula)
When going about my search for an executive coach and a doula, I interviewed about 4-5 people in each category. Going in, I thought it might be helpful to create a consistent framework of questions to help me navigate the nuances of different personalities. While this evolved over time as I spoke with more people, here are the three questions that helped me the most. In either context.
Question 1: What makes your practice or philosophy different from others?
This is probably my favorite question to ask because you get two valuable pieces of information all at once. First, you get to hear — in their own words — what they believe to be their unique value proposition. Second, you get to hear how they reflect on their peers or competition in the space. Often, I’ve noticed the way people react to their peers (whether it’s competitive, collaborative, or isolating) exposes a lot about their personal philosophies and overall character.
Question 2: What does a session look like? What’s happening? How is it structured?
In professions like coaching where the “deliverable” is so abstract, it can be hard to pinpoint what exact you’re looking for in that initial conversation. As a pretty literal person, it helped me to break through the layers of abstraction and try to get them to visualize with me what a session or our experience might look like. By painting a picture together (including things like where we meet what the room looks like, what we talk about, and what the process looks like), I was able to imagine each relationship a bit more clearly. As an added bonus, if I found someone unable to walk me through this “paint the room” exercise with me, I knew that we might not share a similar enough vocabulary to effectively work together.
Question 3: What have your most successful client relationships had in common?
It’s impossible to ask a coach or a doula to predict how exactly things will go for you by the end of their engagement with you. Sometimes, the thing you went in to get coached for morphs into an entirely new problem. And many times, as new mothers know, despite all best intentions, you need to throw your birth plan out the window. So I tried not to ask too much about my success, but instead asked about what they observed about successful previous client relationships. Do most of their clients establish a regular texting relationship? Is there a degree of “homework” or “prep work” needed on the part of the client in order to create a solid working relationship? And, in the case of my doula, how involved were the partners of her clients in the birth process? And what did this look like? Just like the “painting the room” exercise, this question often helped me to listen for subtle cues about their current client base and help me decide for myself if I felt aligned with (or removed from) their operating mode.
Pulling it all Together
By this point, I’ve been working with an exec coach for about three months and had two or three conversations with the doula that I ultimately chose.
While we’re clearly still in the thick of the process, I do believe that I chose well in both cases. In both relationships, I feel a deep sense of commitment in the relationship. And even though both individuals often ask me to explore new processes (in the case of my coach, a new way of thinking; in my doula’s case, a new way of helping me relax my muscles), I am willing to play in these new spaces because we are starting from a foundation of trust.
At the end of the day, whether you’re looking for a coach, a doula, a business partner, a romantic partner, or someone else, I imagine that’s what it all comes down to the most.
Also published on Medium.
Thanks Bethany, I’m going to send this to a friend who was just pondering on how to select a coach, this is very useful!
And best of luck with the pregnancy!
great post, Bethany – thanks for sharing. In a related area, The Guardian published an article recently about a survey that was conducted on what helps people change – it suggested that a trusted mentor is the most important ingredient to personal growth (even more important than the methodology the mentor uses). It made me think about how to position myself for successful growth – and begs the question of how important it is to trust the people we work with if we want to be successful at work. I thought you may be interested in the article https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/jan/10/psychotherapy-childhood-mental-health
Best wishes for the exciting next stage of your life! Emily Steed
The single most important question you should ask anyone is what is their experience and what is the basis of their experience?
I will not touch the doula question as I have NO EXPERIENCE.
But, as a CEO coach for literally hundreds of CEOs, I can tell you that the depth of experience of any coach — in the actual job you are looking for assistance in — is the critical qualification.
VC is a funny undertaking in that VCs often think they are expertly qualified to counsel or coach a CEO. They are typically not and they have a horrific conflict of interest (as viewed from the CEO’s perspective).
A VC is often like a guy who has flown 1MM miles in first class being asked to land the plane. In fact, while he has sat in close proximity to the cockpit, he has never actually flown a plane. This is particularly true, potentially disastrously true, in times of crisis.
I was a CEO for 33 years and cannot tell you how many times I have pulled from memory my own dealings with a critical challenge. It just comes with experience.
This is why smart CEOs rent experience. It is much cheaper.
The other thing that is important is learning style. It is not a disqualifying feature, but as a CEO coach, I always tailor my communication to the manner in which a CEO processes information, makes decisions, and wrestles with change.
In many instances, the CEO doesn’t really know how they process info and they learn on the run. Nothing wrong with that.
One of the most gratifying things in life is watching a CEO take control and soar.
JLM
http://www.themusingsofthebigredcar.com
This is a great analogy!
While fitting into your last catch-all paragraph in the description of “business partner” I believe much of this is applicable to finding an executive recruiting partner as well.
As someone who has birthed four children and two businesses, I will add to the requirements, finding someone who is not set on a narrow approach and willing/able to take a different approach or calculated risk. My obstetrician’s willingness to partner with me led to a last minute change during birth that he ordinarily would have never suggested but in the end admitted was the right course. (He knew to trust the mother’s instincts combined with his understanding of the parameters involved.)
As an executive recruiter, I often rely on my client’s instincts combined with my own instincts and experience (knowing the parameters) to produce brilliant results that a purely formulaic approach would have missed.
Love your title and comparison! And you’re right, we executive coaches DO get all up in your stuff- similar although probably not quite as messy as your doula. One thing I ask prospective Clients to do with me which is different than a doula is to “test drive the coaching experience”. Yes, I can answer your questions afterwards about coaching structure, process, fees, assessment tools etc but nothing quite speaks for the experience like the drive itself. As you observe, we coaches, like your doula or other health care providers, need to speak to you as if we’ve known you for five years. This requires an uncomfortable level of intrusion to [paradoxically] create intimacy [Into-ME-SEE, I call it]. By the time you finish this one hour test drive with me or another coach, you’ll probably have a good sense of what it’s going to be having us along with you for your journey- intruding, laughing and crying with you.