Jess Hunt

Coaching in the Clear

Jess Hunt:

Because what you want, you want progress to be the idea of the person you're managing. You want them to drive the bus. And so you want to elicit, you want to pull from them the best ideas and to do so you have to start with understanding.

Jeff Hunter:

Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter, and you were listening to coaching in the clear, the podcast committed to help you learn about coaching. Coaching is more popular than ever, and we believe that sharing in-depth personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their potential while creating market leading big change businesses. Coaching in the clear is a production of Talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity. We send out a weekly newsletter called the sensemaker where we offer our latest thinking about issues affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content to enable you to unleash your potential, learn more and sign up at Talentism.com. Jess, thank you so much for joining me on Coaching in the Clear. I'm very grateful for your time and for your participation. Thank you so much for joining the conversation.

Jess Hunt:

Thanks Jeff. Delighted to be here.

Jeff Hunter:

Okay. So let's start at the beginning. As I love to know how people come to the world of coaching, when you first hear about it, what you think about it, the first coach you have, can be in an athletic or an executive setting or any other setting. And just generally how you think about coaching.

Jess Hunt:

Well, I remember when I had my first professional coach, my CEO at the time was at a tech enabled startup, New York City, early odds. And my CEO at the time recommended that I get a coach and it was a cohort coaching. And so there were a number of, sort of up and comer managers that I think there were six of us in a group with a coach. And I did the first coaching session with, you know a framework, very thoughtful framework. I now realize, and I went through the first coaching session and we were sharing our challenges, learning more about her framework. And I walked out of the room and I walked down to my CEO, who I was close with, and I said, well, that was a bunch of bullshit. And I really, really wasn't comfortable with what I now know, coaching can ask of you to get a lot out of it, which is vulnerability and self-awareness. And then if you're lucky, self-acceptance and there was a lot of learning involved for me in that first coaching experience, I think, which lasted almost two years and to a coach that I'm still close to.

Jeff Hunter:

Okay. So I love that. I love that you have that experience and goes, that's a load of bullshit. Two reasons I love that. First of all, because I think in the first minute, the audience just got to know you really well. I've had the good fortune of knowing you for a while, but that was awesome. And then the second thing is I believe a lot of people who are suggested into coaching are recommended like a, should get a coach, sort of have that. Like there are the people who are, I think they sort of fall into three camps. There's the people who say no, I'm not going to do that because I don't need a psychologist and that's bologna. Two is like, sure, I'll do it. But in their mind, like no way. I think it's sorta like Matt Damon and Goodwill hunting. It's like, sure, I'll just go mess with them. Or the third is like, they go and they're like, oh, this sort of surprises me. So tell me about going from, Hey, this is really bullshit to, I remember when you and I first met, you're like, well, how does your coaching work? Cause I'm sort of used to this way. How do you go from one coach to another, because you obviously had a profound experience with that first coach.

Jess Hunt:

Yeah, well, she was, I think coaching, that was earlier in my career, coaching at that stage became useful quickly because coaching is highly applicable, at least at that stage in my career, coaching that was highly applicable to my work every day, the content of my work and everyday my interpersonal relationships at work became useful very quickly. And I, in retrospect, I believe that was because I was probably within my first five years of any major management responsibilities and becoming a really good manager, which my coach helped me do, I hope, just made me a lot more effective at work. So I think that coaching experience was earlier in my career and it was management coaching. And management’s a skill as I've moved along and certainly most recently with Talentism, I mean, that's, you balance the management, whether you're managing an executive team or managing a board or investors executive management with executive leadership. So certainly the kind of coaching that I think I've probably required has evolved and what that coaching has asked of me, hopefully it's stayed the same, which is I get as much out of it as I put into it.

Jeff Hunter:

Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And one of the things we talk about is different forms of coaching, and this is just sort of our language around it, nothing that's, I think, widely accepted in the industry and probably derives from the fact that we came to coaching sort of as outsiders as executives ourselves. So we were, we were executives and then had never, I'd never coached anybody before and people asked me to do it. I thought, well sure, but I wonder if I, what it is and if I could even be good at it. And through that research a lot and try to understand and simplify this incredibly complex world of all these, you know, career coaches and life coaches and executive coaches, business coaches, yada, yada, there's just a ton of them. And so we came with this thing like there's times when you just need a safe space to talk, there are times where you need someone to show you the way, like, you know, help you train in a specific skill or craft. And there are times people actually need to help you get to clarity, which is obviously where we're trying to operate, but just take me through that a little bit in the nature of our engagement and the nature of how you think about coaching. If you were recommending coaching to somebody, how would you help them think through other than just really in their career later in their career, how would you help them think through when they need someone who helps them sort of hone a particular skill and when they need someone who's identifying for them, how they're standing in the way of their overall success, given their cognitive profile and how they're thinking and behaving?

Jess Hunt:

Yeah, well, you've seen much, much, much more than I have, but I've certainly managed lots of people. And tried to be cognizant and incur, cognizant of when someone needs coaching or could really benefit from coaching and proactive in helping them get coaching or becoming open to coaching. When that is true. The two times I can see coaching being or feel easy to me as a manager, a leader of executives is when someone really does need a space to work through challenges at work that are yes, practical, but may have something to do with their emotions or psychology or thei...