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

Leadership coaching will be most helpful for new or aspiring managers with less than 3 years of people management experience. However, I am open to working with all managers and leaders willing to reflect on their management methods to achieve next-level results. The benefits of coaching will vary based on level of experience, growth areas, and improvement goals. My coaching often focuses on people management: creating a healthy work culture, delegation, hiring, firing, career growth, performance management, and other related domains. I also coach on prioritization, productivity, building trust, vulnerability, productive disagreements/conflicts, managing stress, and other domains that apply to all EAs. My area of greatest specialization and passion is giving and receiving feedback, which I see as 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.

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 or harsh accountability-based approaches. Once the coachee’s most important goals are surfaced, I also provide gentle encouragement to focus time on the areas of growth that are most pertinent to reaching those goals.

I do a significant amount of work both before and after sessions to prepare, reflect, identify resources that may help the coachee, and suggest additional ways to practice and develop skills in identified growth areas. I encourage the coachee to pursue the approaches we collaboratively develop between sessions, as this is where the majority of the growth occurs.

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 two positive testimonials from people in the EA community, and three positive testimonials from people 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, EA knowledge, alignment with EA’s values, and intent to adapt and optimize my offering for EA. 

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 measurable results. But I aim to provide value from the very first session by helping the coachee discover simple, practical takeaways that can be immediately applied.

Cost

My regular charge is $150/hour ($225 for a typical-length 90-minute session). I’m offering discounted coaching (40% of normal rate) for some EAs who don’t have a budget for personal/career development: $60 for a 60-min session, $90 for a 90-min session.