Cedric talks to Eric Nehrlich about driving down the error rate for Google's revenue forecasting from 10-20% down to 0.5%, his approach to executive coaching, and how to come up with small experiments for personal growth.
I just wanted to thank @eric for taking the time to do this interview with me. And also to apologise — it took wayyy too long to edit and to get it out there!
Woo hoo! I’m excited to listen to it and find out what I said!
@eric , I found this interview super useful!
I’m doing an executive coaching diploma, because some of the most enjoyable and effective work I do centers around helping people figure out how to overcome blockers in some way or another.
I went back to this interview to see if you shed light on a question I was turning over in my mind about coaching.
I’ve been exposed to the principles of coaching before. That it’s very much centered on the person being coached and their ability to figure out their own ways through a situation, given appropriate chance for reflection. As you said in the interview:
…one of the principles of coaching is that the person has everything they need. They can figure it out if you give them the support they need and the space they need to figure it out.
And so of course the diploma course takes that as a basis, and you must demonstrate that you can center the person being coached, and not bring in too much of your own knowledge or viewpoints.
And this makes total sense, not only because we are not the person in the situation, so our judgements are always limited. But also because if we become active advisors, we may create a relationship of dependency.
However, in practice, there often seems to be a certain blend of the coach’s own expertise or insights, with that classic coaching frame. Some examples:
I have recently had some really useful straight-down-the-line coaching at work, from a colleague who’s certified and very experienced. But she was fine about sharing sometimes some relevant experiences that she had had, to help me reflect on what was going on for me. And occasionally she would make a direct suggestion. Once she prefaced it with “this is not really coaching, but how about…” And the suggestion was really useful. I didn’t take it directly but it sparked a response from me of something that I could do to achieve the same result.
The existence of different varieties of coaches, who get business and are effective partly because of their background in an certain area, shows that a coach is not merely a neutral sounding-board, someone whose domain background is irrelevant. For example there are executive coaches, career coaches, etc, and each of them states on their site the relevant experience they have in a domain.
A sports coach in particular tends to be a bit more directive sometimes — for example the judo coach that @cedric described in that interview and elsewhere.
So I was mulling over this seeming contradiction — the need to really prioritize the coachee’s goals, viewpoints, and abilities, with the coach’s possession of some domain background or other experience that can sometimes be helpful. How to get the balance right?
And the way you talked it through in the interview helped resolve it. You discussed that you are quite clear when in a coaching session you temporarily go into more of a mentoring mode. And you’re upfront that the mentoring may have limitations — your experience may not exactly match the coachee’s situation. As you said:
So I’m always pretty careful when I’m coaching to say, here’s what I might do in your situation, or here’s what I might have tried. What am I missing? Help me understand what’s different about your situation. So I’m always leaving that opening of, I don’t have the answer, I have an answer.
That, along with the approach that my colleague took, starts to show me how a little skilful mentoring can be used along with authentic coaching. The danger is getting too carried away with the mentoring of course. But part of me taking this diploma course is to anchor myself in the fundamentals, and get some good practice and observation.