Leadership Coaching

I help EAs build leadership and management skills, increase their effectiveness and performance, grow their organizations and achieve their visions. I’ve been coaching EAs in management and leadership since September 2022. 

Who I help and the benefits I provide

My coaching is most beneficial for new or aspiring managers and leaders with less than 3 years of people management experience. My specialization is leadership and people management: creating a healthy work culture, building teams, delegation, hiring, firing, career growth, performance management, and other related domains. 

However, I also coach on many other domains that apply to everyone, including prioritization, productivity, building trust, vulnerability, productive disagreements/conflicts, managing stress, and others. 

My area of greatest specialization and passion is giving and receiving feedback, which is necessary for peak performance, but undervalued and underutilized. 

See my FAQ for some hypothetical customer profiles and concrete benefits they might get, and a list of management/leadership problems I can help with.

Clients who get results from coaching are those who engage deeply, reflect constantly, push outside their comfort zone, and wholeheartedly experiment with new methods, mindsets and behaviors. These are the most important qualities for working with me to reach high performance and next-level results.

My coaching approach

My coaching is collaborative. I ask a lot of questions, listen carefully, and work with the coachee to build solutions that make sense to them and that are built around their own self-knowledge and intuition. Often I am able to bring in best practices or proven strategies within the domains that I have expertise. 

Individual context varies widely based on experience, role, organization, skills and talents, goals, and personality. As such, my approach is flexible and adaptive. I do not force any particular methodology or coaching technique. I am constantly gathering feedback and data from the coachee to learn ways to provide the most value. I request periodic assessments to zoom out and understand the overall trajectory of coaching.

I work with coachees to develop and grow on multiple levels of depth. These range from immediately applicable tools and systems, to adopting productive mindsets and mental models, and finally examining habitual, ingrained behavioral patterns. My coaching approach respects the fact that trust and vulnerability are essential to growth on these deeper levels. 

I provide an open space for reflection, discussion, expression (and sometimes venting), free of judgment and negative reinforcement. I also provide gentle but firm encouragement to actively experiment with the approaches we collaboratively develop, and I help coachees establish and track action items. Work done by the coachee between sessions is where the majority of the growth occurs. I recognize that the process of that growth is uncomfortable and positive moral support has an important place in that process.

I do a significant amount of work both before and after sessions to prepare, reflect, identify resources that may help the coachee.

Qualifications and Track Record

Over my 11+ year career as a manager, I coached about 50 software engineers and other managers in growing their skills and making progress towards their career goals. I have done thousands of professional 1-to-1 conversations, refining my listening, emotional intelligence and trust-building skills. I promoted 12 people at Amazon, requiring coaching over several months to help individuals grow in many different technical and leadership skill areas. I’m versed in leadership, best practices and work culture knowledge that made Amazon a world leader in many different industries. I scaled an organization from 8 to 25 people using my leadership practices, hiring, career growth and coaching approach. 

I have coached EAs since September 2022. I have positive testimonials from both people in the EA community and those I coached in industry (see Appendix of this document).

My comparative advantage for coaching in EA is my combination of people-management and coaching experience, knowledge of industry best practices in management and leadership (which led companies like Bloomberg and Amazon be global leaders), EA knowledge, alignment with EA’s values, and intent to adapt and optimize my offering for EAs. 

Time Commitment

The time-commitment of coaching is dependent on the specific needs of the client. Most often it will consist of a 90-minute coaching session and 1-2 hours of offline reading/practice every two weeks. Typically coaching needs to take place over 4-5 months to achieve lasting behavior changes, as that provides enough opportunity for repeated experimentation, reflection, learning from challenges and feedback. But I always provide concrete value from the very first session by helping the coachee discover simple, practical tools and methods that can be immediately applied.

Cost

The cost of a 60-minute session is $250 and a 90-minute session is $375. I provide discounted rates for some Effective Altruists and EA organizations who don't have a personal/career development budget that could cover coaching. Reach out and we can agree on a discounted rate.