Maximize Executive Coaching with Sue Bethanis (Founder & CEO of Mariposa Leadership)
Maximize Executive Coaching with Sue Bethanis (Founder & CEO of Mariposa Leadership)
Chat with Sue Bethanis (Founder & CEO of Mariposa Leadership)
Welcome to this week’s free article of Level Up: Your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans. If you’d like to become a paid member, see the benefits here, and feel free to use this expense template to ask your manager.
Upcoming event exclusive to paid members:
July 12: What Your Manager Won't Tell You: The Art of Managing Up — Fireside chat with Wes Kao (RSVP link here)
During my journey to Vice President at Amazon, I got critical guidance from 3 different executive coaches.
A good coach can do at least 3 things:
Help you identify blind spots, problem areas, and blockers.
Give you specific tools to get better.
Help you fully recognize and exploit your strengths.
My final and best coach, Sue Bethanis (Founder & CEO of Mariposa Leadership), was hired when I joined the executive team at Twitch.
Watch our chat below where we discuss how to make the most of your work with a coach and how to get funding for coaching.
Note: Live attendance was exclusive to paid newsletter members.
Listen now on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Takeaways
(1) The four most common areas of focus for Sue’s corporate clients: Strategic Influence, Executive Presence, Engaging Your Team, & Stress Management.
Strategic Influence:
You cannot influence without a strategic point of view.
You must understand the market and your company’s goals to develop a strategic point of view. And it starts with reading. You must create time to read.
Executive Presence:
How are you balancing grace with gravitas?
Humor is a powerful skill. You have to put people at ease.
Engaging Your Team:
A popular topic is how you engage your team in hybrid, remote, and in-person settings.
Stress Management:
Stress is a powerful motivator but when it turns into “worry” it becomes a problem and impacts everything else.
(2) Real Play > Role Play: The bulk of coaching is pre-playing what could happen (a real problem) and then debriefing what did happen.
Coaching is:
What’s the issue?
What have you tried so far?
What do you want to try next?
Effective coaching is a blend of using current problems as a lens to be higher performance immediately and discussing what you are learning to do better next time (long-term skills to use once coaching ends).
Coaches have different styles, that said, clients come to Ethan and Sue for their first-hand experience and to learn what they have done, what they’ve seen others do, and what other clients have been successful with.
(3) Clients who maximize coaching send clear and specific goals before sessions to prepare their coach.
Give your coach context and time to process your goals by emailing key times beforehand:
Here’s what I’ve been thinking about.
Here’s what I’ve been working on.
I messed up on XYZ.
I want to figure out how to deepen my learning on ABC.
Your coach may also have a system to prompt you.
Example: One of Sue’s coaching clients is starting a new job on Monday and completed an in-depth profile questionnaire (Sue provided), emailed Sue the leadership principles he is working on for his team, and then sent the 3 things he wants to work on for the new role. All in, Sue had 2 hours of content to prepare.
Recommended client reading before starting coaching to maximize time:
What Got You Here Won'T Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith
Sue’s book Leadership Chronicles of a Corporate Sage: Five Keys to Becoming a More Effective Leader
Harvard Business Review (HBR) article Harnessing the Science of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini
(4) To get your company to pay for your coaching you must have sponsorship and nail the business case.
Make the business case:
Be clear on your goals (what do you want to work on).
What results will you get the company?
You must think of yourself as a Steward of the Company. You are working for the company, you are trying to make the company better with new ideas and innovations.
Negotiate coaching as part of your benefits when joining a new company/role.
Follow Sue on LinkedIn and explore Mariposa Leadership.
Mariposa Leadership, Inc., a 15-person San Francisco- based firm, which provides executive coaching and design thinking to high-tech leaders.
Sue is the author of the well-received business book Leadership Chronicles of a Corporate Sage and hosts the popular show WiseTalk, a monthly leadership forum, and WiseSpace, a Zoom coaching community.
Sue has worked with many Silicon Valley and San Francisco companies and non-profits, including C-level Executives and VPs at Amazon, Apple, Cisco, eBay, EqCA, Expedia, GoFundMe, Google, Guru, HPE, Intel, LinkedIn, Microsoft, MongoDB, Monite, Paypal, Pinterest, Roku, Twitch, Workday, Yahoo!, and Zynga.
If you want to contact Sue, email her at: sueb@mariposaleadership.com
I hope this advice helps you plan ahead for your career. If you’re already in executive roles (e.g. Director, Sr. Director, VP) and want to optimize performance or move up further, consider my course, Cracking the C-suite 'How to Get and Master Key Executive Roles' which I co-teach with Sue who has coached 400+ tech executives.
What Your Manager Won't Tell You: The Art of Managing Up — Fireside chat with Wes Kao
Effective managing up is a skill that follows you throughout your career because when your boss trusts, relies, and supports you…you have options.
Level Up Newsletter & Community paid members are invited to join us live where Wes and Jason will discuss:
Key principles when managing up.
Finesse when managing up to intense senior executives.
What people (even top performers) get wrong about managing up.
Tips to level up your strategic communications.
How to manage lean teams with big goals.
Live audience Q&A.
Level Up Community: Inside Look
In Slack, what members are talking about and how they are helping one another:
Frameworks to quantity ROI for Business Analytics and/or Data Science (not MLE) teams.
How to embark on a career in GenAI for non-engineer / CS background professionals.
How to plan your week as a Senior Engineer in Big Tech.
How to get more done this week.
Influential communication as a product leader.
I was rejected from my first promotion at Google. Here's how I took control of my career and landed 3 promotions.
How to make your reports more substantial.
Traits of top performers article.
Questions to ask that help you get to know people more deeply.
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Existing members, if you want to join our private Slack Community, click the Slack link in this member-only weekly Friday article.
Connect With Ethan & Jason
Ethan’s leadership development courses to go in-depth: Live online courses and On-demand courses.
Level Up Newsletter & Community: Existing paid members, read the latest member-only weekly update (includes the link to join our private Slack community). Non-members, if you want to join, read about member benefits.
Level Up is your source for career growth solutions & community by retired Amazon Vice President, Ethan Evans.