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Leading Teams in High Growth, High Pressure Environments: Seth Weissman, Executive Coach
120 Plays1 year ago
What does it take to build up your legal team? Is it possible to work effectively without a foundation of trust and vulnerability? What role does emotional intelligence take in nurturing careers? And how do you proceed in a role when you don’t know how to make the first big step?
Seth Weissman is no stranger to navigating difficult business challenges without a roadmap. Now an executive coach, he previously led SolarCity to IPO and acquisition by Tesla as GC and Executive Vice President, and grew Marqeta’s legal team of four to fifty as Chief Legal Officer.
Join Seth as he discusses why it pays to approach legal like a businessperson, the importance of mentors, and what it takes to make the switch from GC to executive coach. He also shares lessons from his time working at a mission-driven energy company with Elon Musk on the board.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-13
Topics:
Introduction: 0:00
Letting unconventional thinking guide your career: 2:27
Working in SolarCity’s mission-driven environment to commercialize solar energy: 7:20
Releasing IPO and selling to Tesla: 13:38
Working with Elon Musk at SolarCity: 18:06
Turning a legal team of 4 into a division of 50 at Marqeta: 22:10
Finding inspiration to become an executive coach: 31:12
Finding an executive coach and justifying the expense: 43:35
Final questions: 50:20
Connect with us:
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
Seth Weissman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethweissman/
Seth’s Blog Page: https://www.sethweissman.com/blog
Seth’s Lessons from Racing School: https://www.sethweissman.com/blog/lessons
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading CLM platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues. Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
Introduction to Seth Weissman and His Offerings
00:00:02
Speaker
My USC was, I'll invest in you, I'll mentor, I'll coach you, I'll grow you. And if you want my job, you can have it when I'm done with it, or I'll get you another one that's better, right? And that's the deal.
00:00:19
Speaker
From leading legal teams through high stakes IPOs to being at the forefront of Tesla's acquisition of SolarCity and now nurturing leaders as an executive coach, his journey is filled with rich experiences. I'm Tyler Finn, your host, and today we are diving into this fascinating career trajectory with Seth Weissman.
Tyler Finn's Introduction of Seth Weissman
00:00:41
Speaker
Seth's a seasoned lawyer who recently dedicated himself
00:00:45
Speaker
full time to executive coaching. I think his new website went live a couple of days before we recorded this. In a previous life, I suppose, Seth was a GC at Marketa and led them through their 2021 IPO, growing a small legal team there into a function of 50.
00:01:07
Speaker
We have a number of amazing stories for you.
Insights from Seth's Career at SolarCity and Interactions with Elon Musk
00:01:10
Speaker
Before that, he was the GC of Solar City, where he led their 2012 IPO and their subsequent sale to Tesla. His stories from the boardroom, including with a guy who's in the news a bit, Elon Musk, are bound with nuggets of wisdom for all of our listeners. Super excited for this conversation today. Seth, welcome to The Abstract. Hey, thanks for having me. It's great to be here with you. Thank you.
00:01:37
Speaker
Okay. I've got to ask cause it's in the, it's in the tiny corner of the frame. Yoda is there before we get into the law. Tell us a little bit about why you, you like to have Yoda sitting behind you, looking over your shoulder, sort of a copilot over here. My ears look like Yoda's ears. I've been told by family and friends. So there's, there's that as well. Yoda says in episode four, when Luke's trying to lift the ship.
00:02:06
Speaker
He says, do or do not, there is no try. And to me, it's a reminder of if you want anything, if you want something bad enough and you've connected with the why behind it, you'll get it. You just have to want it badly enough.
00:02:24
Speaker
That's a great start. We're going to talk all about how you share those sorts of tips with your executive coaching clients later on. But before we get to that, I really want to go back to the beginning.
Motivations Behind Seth's Legal Career Choice
00:02:36
Speaker
How did you end up as a lawyer? What was it that inspired you to go to law school? I think when you grow up being raised in North Jersey and your parents are both Jewish and you're in a sort of culturally Jewish, you're either a doctor or a lawyer.
00:02:53
Speaker
or we found the family horribly and the Swedish word is it's a shanda, a shame that you haven't done this. Given that I was squeamish about blood, it was a really easy choice. I just saw myself as a lawyer from the time I was 13. What I got wrong was the kind of lawyer. I thought like most people who watch TV that lawyers go to courtrooms and they have squabbles and they go from taking a client to
00:03:23
Speaker
LA law trial in 45 minutes. And I didn't realize what it really meant to be a litigator. I ended up starting as a litigator because I thought that's what lawyers did. And I changed dramatically over the course of my career. And I just felt a calling. So all through high school, all through college, I knew I was going to law school. And I was out of law school and practicing by the age of 24.
00:03:46
Speaker
Oh wow, fast journey. I had a similar experience as a kid actually wanting, I never ended up going to law school, wanting to be a lawyer. It was really, you know, law and order, right? Seeing prosecutors in a courtroom, recording from New York City here in New York City,
Career Transformation in California During the Internet Boom
00:04:00
Speaker
right? I mean, everyone knows those shows. I think that's what a lot of people have in their mind. You ended up in the Valley though. You went to law school, stayed in Boston, practiced for a little while.
00:04:10
Speaker
but you joined Wilson Suncini in 1997. Probably a pretty exciting time to be joining that particular firm. What brought you to the West Coast and started to change your view of what the law was? Yeah. My then fiance, Margaret Robbins and I, I wanted to be in California for years. I had that East Coast, California dream. Everything's perfect and everyone's tanned and in great shape when they're playing
00:04:39
Speaker
falling off all the time. I had some version of that. It didn't include fog, but I looked at it a lot later. So I interviewed and it was 1997, and the internet had just blown up. I mean, literally the world just changed. As Thomas Friedman said, the world got flatter, right? The epicness of the world was stunning.
00:05:05
Speaker
And I think I had 10 interviews in five days in a trip out to California. I had already passed the bar. I had already studied and passed the bar while I was living in Boston. So I was ready to go. I remember walking through the halls of Wilson with Fred Alvarez, who was at that point leading the practice. And Fred said, this is where we meant internet billionaires. How cool is that? Like it's literally all happening
00:05:33
Speaker
at this firm in this office on 650 Page Mill Road. I was starry eyed. I thought, this is where I want to be. I want to be at the intersection of a new industry and technology and a law firm that was thinking differently. I was unconventional. I've always been a little bit hollering outside the lines.
00:05:57
Speaker
They were okay with coloring outside of the lines. Can you give us an example of that? I'm really curious. It's not in the script, but you know, what was that sort of like unconventional thinking as you counseled clients in the, you know, in what was really the.com boom, anything that you'd share there? I think a lot of it was they, the firm really encouraged us to be business people with legal battles, right? If you weren't, I was taught, if you weren't, you know, able to say,
00:06:25
Speaker
Here's what I would do given what I know about your business and given the situation you're in, that you really weren't lawyering at the level you were capable of. So many things were first impression. And if there's an issue of first impression, there's no right answer. So come up with one that makes sense, that when you told your family at home that they wouldn't go, oh, what did you do? That just made sense.
00:06:53
Speaker
And that was a ticket to really working with entrepreneurs who don't have the time to think about your ivory tower pontification. They don't know what to do because their business is growing at 1000% and they're spinning plates.
00:07:09
Speaker
Seth has a ton of other experiences besides the three that we're going to talk about today, so you'll have to reach out to him afterwards. But I want to skip ahead a few years.
Seth's Leadership Role at SolarCity and Mentorship Emphasis
00:07:20
Speaker
It wasn't your first GC role, but of course, I think folks are going to be really interested to hear about your time at SolarCity. This was a pretty cool mission-driven organization working on the forefront to actually commercialize and bring solar tech to people's homes.
00:07:37
Speaker
Yeah. And you were there and this is consistent across your career, I think you were there for quite a while you were there for eight years you joined just after the company's founding. Tell us about those early days at SolarCity and what it was like to be in that office. The key skill set of being a GC at an early stage or in that case, maybe early stages company is to be comfortable while you're uncomfortable.
00:08:05
Speaker
to be consciously incompetent, moving to consciously competent, and being able to be with that journey. Because what you're doing, again, hasn't been done before. There was never a vertically integrated energy company. We were building a distributed utility across 16 states, hadn't been done before, no Harvard Business Review, no plans like Lyndon and Peter working under Elon as the board chair,
00:08:35
Speaker
We're doing this and coming up with the ideas and how to execute in real time. So I was uncomfortable all the time. It was go solve this, right? Figure out a way forward, right? That was ethical and legal and business savvy. And, you know, the files were in a drawer and I got there and there was no this policy or that policy. And, you know, lucky for me, I just spent years at Wilson and I said,
00:09:04
Speaker
Hey, I need the firm and the people who can be uncomfortable with me. I found Steve Bernard there who was my mentor. And this will be a theme I think throughout is like mentoring people and being mentored. Like, you know, Fred Alvarez, Rico Rosales, Steve Bernard, Alan Austin. There were a number of people at Wilson who mentored me. And that once I got inside by Solar City, I was five years now as a GC.
00:09:34
Speaker
I rely on those folks to help me, right? Yeah, it paid so the dividends were stunning But solar city, so I think I say to my wife and we reflect on things Everyone in their life should have you know, one great love in their life one great pet and one great job I've had all three now, right? I've been married 25 years my dog sasha was the best dog in the world and um
00:10:03
Speaker
And Solar City was that job that just filled my heart for eight and a half years. What type of dog was Sasha? Sasha was a lab collie shepherd mix. And she lived a 16 and a half and she was that dog that everyone said, you know, I want a dog just like that. I'm like, forget it, right? Stupid luck. One in a thousand because I've had dogs my whole life. This is ridiculously good dog.
00:10:29
Speaker
You can't have one. Yeah. I love my club now. She's not Sasha, but anyone who knows my dogs knows. Yeah. Sasha was the dog and solar city was the job was the place. Right. It was just an incredible journey. The people there were all in a mission together. Like when you at our best as human beings, we build from a foundation of trust. We, and then we build great relationships and great businesses from that place.
00:10:59
Speaker
We cared about each other. We trusted each other. We were vulnerable with each other. And we moved mountains at that business over the course of eight years. A follow-up question on your comment of being able to work with so many of your mentors from your time at the firm now as the GC. I actually never thought to ask this of anyone before. What's that transition like? Or how did you think of that? Because you're the client.
00:11:27
Speaker
But you're also maybe a little bit starry eyed at the fact that this was a person who mentored you very early on in your career. The law is a little bit unique in that way, although I suppose CFOs and bankers and maybe there's similarities there. Tell us about that transition for you. How did you work with and build a working relationship with those folks? Really great question. I think we started from a position of mutual respect.
00:11:52
Speaker
They respected me as someone who did not know what they were doing Learn from them And respected me as someone who was a common-sense business person with a legal background now Right, and I respected them as someone who cared about getting the answer quote-unquote right and also cared about me as a client and as a person because they had invested in me as a person I think as in-house counsel sometimes you can be a
00:12:21
Speaker
I'm going to say you can be really demanding of your outside counsel. It's not an easy job. So I tried to remember that, you know, I wasn't their only client and, and very likely wasn't their biggest client or the most important client. So to really ask them for things that were fair and ask them for advice that I really needed on timelines that made sense. And over time we just had a new relationship as colleagues, right? And,
00:12:51
Speaker
I would recommend them to my friends and recommend them to other GCs. They always gave me great advice and sometimes shared uncomfortable stories with me about what I needed to hear, not what I wanted to hear.
00:13:06
Speaker
During your time at SolarCity, there were two, I think it's fair to characterize them as somewhat of blockbuster transactions, right? Like first you led the company through successful IPO and then the sale to Tesla. Tell us, I mean, that's a high pressure environment, right? Tell us a little bit about what it was like to lead the legal team through both of those transactions, somewhat back to back.
00:13:33
Speaker
I think this is kind of interesting. What were you thinking about when there's all this external buzz happening, right? Versus like keeping your head down and keeping your team focused on getting the deals done or getting the transactions done.
The Journey Through SolarCity's IPO and Tesla Acquisition
00:13:46
Speaker
Yeah. So we went public in 12, we sold in 16. So we had a little space between the two. I think I'd start with it's about the team. As a leader, you are never better than your team. You are merely a representation of the quality of the people that you've managed to attract.
00:14:02
Speaker
train and retain over time. And when I started building out the corporate legal function at SolarCity, I started with Feng Fellows. She's now the general counsel at Aladeid. Before that, she was general counsel at Zynga. Feng was my quarterback, a right hand to me and also a dear, dear friend. So another one of those moments where someone I cared about personally came to work with me professionally. Yeah. And she built an extraordinary team.
00:14:32
Speaker
of folks from Wilson. The only thing more valuable than a great associate is a great client. And so Wilson was very kind when we
00:14:41
Speaker
borrowed a few of such shits to build. Yeah. Seth Weisman coaching tree is also, I mean, not in just in your role as an executive coach, but maybe in the various junior attorneys in-house who you've mentored is probably pretty strong. I think that Belichick or Parcells or Landry, like that's a role model for me. I think the current number is 12 of my former Solar City and Marketa folks.
00:15:08
Speaker
have been GC or are currently GCs right now. That's incredible. And telling that you intentionally that you think about that, that you keep track of that, that that's a sort of a model that you wanted when you were leading teams, right? And building people up and setting them up for great success all throughout their careers. So how are you recruiting, right? Like what are you selling? Because you're selling in essence, you're selling yourself as a leader.
00:15:35
Speaker
and you're selling the company. Those are the only things you really have to sell. And so if you want to be selling as a leader with a unique selling proposition, we say this in sales, a USP. The USP was I'll invest in you, I'll mentor, I'll coach you, I'll grow you. And if you want my job, you can have it when I'm done with it, or I'll get you another one that's better, right? And that's the deal. And that deal worked for me for, you know, I was a GC for 19 years. That deal worked.
00:16:05
Speaker
because that's investing in people and why wouldn't it work for everybody? Why can't that street go two ways? That's a very fair bargain. I would take that deal. Me too. Me too. And I got that deal from a number of folks in my career, but back to the point at Wilson and Fong and then bringing Fong over in Solar City's IPO, you know, you just have to focus on what's in front of you. So, you know, there's a,
00:16:32
Speaker
There's a racing statement about drive the track in front of you, and wherever you drive, wherever your eyes look, the car goes. Do not look at the wall. Do not look at the skid marks and the big blemish on the wall at the track. That's where you're going. With the IPO at SolarCity was, okay, let's focus on what we have today in front of us right now. Let's not focus on the share price. Let's not focus on a year. Let's not focus on the lockup.
00:17:02
Speaker
just do the work that's right in front of us. Because what we control as human beings is very minute, but we can control where we put our attention in a given moment. Sure.
00:17:14
Speaker
A final question for you on your time at SolarCity. Elon Musk was the chairman of the company. You know, two co-founders were two of his cousins. And then Tesla, where he was also the CEO, acquired the business. I don't think this is, you know, everyone knows the story. Yeah, this is very public history. And, you know, a bit of time has passed since then. And he certainly has a much different public persona and position probably than, than he did at the time. World's richest man.
00:17:39
Speaker
Tell us a little bit about what it was like, though, in those days to work for an organization where he was in the board room and what your impressions were of of working with him as as you counseled the board. Yeah, thank you. One thing that I learned after leaving Solar City was having Elon's brand, especially back in that time between 2008 and 16, it made it very easy to recruit. Yeah. Really wanted to be part
00:18:08
Speaker
Of of an organization that he was the chairperson of an investor of and also our mission was so pure Was fantastic, right? You know, we're gonna help save the world literally Right by by putting clean energy on every home and just become an incredibly large utility You know, it's funny now seeing him as as someone who has you know, the former twitter platform, right and you know There was a time. I remember we were talking about our sales process back at solar city
00:18:38
Speaker
We were talking about our multi-channel process. And we had direct sales, we had online sales, all these door knocking sales. And I remember a specific comment because it was very insightful. There were a couple of specific comments that now 10 or 12 years later, I'm like, that was really insightful. He said at the time, the internet was still ramping. What you do on the internet becomes an arbiter of truth. And so if you're doing something on the internet, you have
00:19:07
Speaker
better be consistent with it intellectually and ethically off of the internet and vice versa. So how you treated your online customers should be the same way you treat your direct customers because they're going to learn about it because the internet will spread it all. It was like an ethical lesson about how to treat and be with customers. I also remember him having the foresight to say that someday there will be a battery shortage and that we will need more battery capacity. And I was like,
00:19:37
Speaker
I mean, more battery capacity. It's hard to get any batteries in the world right now. Someday there'll be battery backups for all these solar systems and that will lead a ton of batteries for cars and there won't be enough plants for it.
00:19:52
Speaker
And I was very skeptical and very wrong. I don't think there's any, well, I haven't read the book on him yet, but I don't think there's any doubt that he is in many ways visionary and sees solutions to problems, but also problems that other folks don't quite see yet among a variety of other, you know,
00:20:14
Speaker
character challenges or flaws. He does bring that to the table and is able to will some of these solutions that no one else would be able to will into existence. You know, back to Yoda, there is no try. I think that there's something about humans that we rarely understand what we're capable of until we have a strong enough why or until we try to exceed our abilities. Elon is very aware of that and will push people
00:20:42
Speaker
very, very, very hard. We can have a conversation about how is that for particular humans and for particular people. And the results also speak to the power of understanding what human potential is. So there's an ethical conversation to have in that. And the results have been quite impressive.
Building a Legal Team at Marketa During the Pandemic
00:21:07
Speaker
Turning to your time at Marketa, another really successful experience for you. When you joined, you had a legal team of four and by the time you left and it led the company through an IPO, you built that team up to 50 people. It's a pretty sizable legal function.
00:21:23
Speaker
How did you try to build culture within that team as the business scaled and as your team scaled? There's no way you can have 50 direct reports. No, I, you know, it's interesting. When I look back at the two experiences, Marchetta was harder. In summary, I think FinTech solar set had its own challenges. FinTech was harder because again,
00:21:47
Speaker
It was completely make it up as you go along. It was very much a new industry and it was on fire like blowing up. It was also COVID. Yeah. You know, none of us had done talk about being comfortable with the uncomfortable. Sure. You know how to build, you know, relationships and trust and be vulnerable this way. This was unheard of to lead team meetings. Yep.
00:22:16
Speaker
And I think I just went back to the basics, which is trust is the foundation of all human relationships, right? A precursor to trust is psychological safety. Knowing that you can be a version of your authentic self, say what you're going to say, do what you're going to do, make mistakes and be human. And the way you build psychological safety, the precursor to that is being personally vulnerable. Now, if you don't tell people about your health concerns, as a leader, you don't say, you don't share, hey,
00:22:45
Speaker
You know, you can't believe this health issue we're having. My doctor says no. Hey, I'm not perfect either. Hey, I'm concerned or I'm challenged by this too. I'm human like you. And that creates a psychological safety, which creates the trust, which creates the team. And so I went back to those principles, which had been drilled into me, having been coached for 20 years.
00:23:10
Speaker
and having read all the coaching materials and the books that really formed my understanding of what leading was. If you start with those basic principles, most things will follow from that. Back to the unique selling proposition, come here, I'll invest in you. It was really hard, Marchetta, because we were building an IPO-ready company as a distributed workforce across the country, and there wasn't a template for how to do this again.
00:23:40
Speaker
Yeah, I went through a very interesting experience during that time in COVID. I actually went through a merger in March of 2020. It was announced about two weeks after the world shut down, publicly announced. And of course, there's a riff associated with any merger, and then you're trying to bring two businesses together. And one of the businesses that acquired another company a year prior as well, so you're almost trying to merge three sets of
00:24:07
Speaker
executives and get them all on the same page three different teams i found and we did all over google hangouts and zoom mixable and it was a very small thing to do at the time but i found that one thing that
00:24:22
Speaker
executive leaders, the ones who I think were able to build trust within their teams best, they set the example on these calls of not allowing the calls to turn entirely into a tactical let's get this done. They were the ones at the very beginning saying, this thing happened to me today while I was walking outside to get my lunch.
00:24:45
Speaker
How are all of you doing? Who has gone outside today, right? They were the ones who said, no, no, no, we know that in a merger like this, we have to build trust. I'm going to waste 20% of every meeting, waste is a loaded word, but I'm going to waste 20% of every meeting on just conversation. Or I don't care if we spend half of our one-on-one just getting to know each other because we're not going to have the opportunity to do that.
00:25:13
Speaker
in our free time, quote unquote, because we're not going to be around each other very much. Anyway, an experience to, I think, reinforce the point you're making about leaders really needing to be the ones who set that tone in a virtual or distributed environment. In any environment, frankly, Todd, you know, again, because your success as a leader is wholly dependent on the success of your team, how you show up for them and how you react to them and how you build rapport with them as human beings,
00:25:42
Speaker
It matters. There are people, right? When I coach leaders who say, I wish everyone would just be quiet and do their work. Well, I would say we're taller and can dunk a basket. That's not happening. I wish I had more hair. There's a lot of people. That's just not realistic. So embrace the role you have. And if you really, and the irony of it is if you embrace it and you put the effort
00:26:12
Speaker
you'll actually reach such incredible rewards. I've got another question for you around your team. Team of 50, I think there are probably folks out there at public companies who are listening to this who may have very large legal teams, but I suspect 50 people is more employees than most of our listeners have managed before, been able to hire before.
00:26:31
Speaker
How did you maintain a pulse on what was happening within your team? How did you think about structuring it in the right way? Was that something that emerged organically or were you sort of really intentional about how you structured the team and designed a team that would have really sort of open information flow? Great question. And a really hard one, especially as things grow in scale. The amount of information becomes large.
00:27:00
Speaker
the team becomes large and what's the critical information stream even have. So, you know, the first thought is I can't manage 50 people. I've got to manage the team that leads those folks. So the first principle there is they on that horizontal line, you know, that X axis as my directs, they need to be one team. They need to be extraordinarily trusting of each other, have productive conflict,
00:27:29
Speaker
commit to each other, they have to know that the team they're on is not the functional team they lead, but the vice presidents that report to me team that they're on. That's interesting. That is a key learning for any team at any company that we go through in coaching is what team are you on? Because that changes the nature of how you react and how you work with your peers and how you lead your team. So if the head of IP and the head of product counseling and the head of corporate,
00:27:58
Speaker
have great relationships on my team and know what's going on. It's much less likely that their reports, a level or two down, are going to be crosswise on their advice or what they're doing or have turf wars or politics between them. So I start with the team that needs all of my teams. And that team always provides each other and me a three by three every week before we have our weekly meeting. The most important things you're working on
00:28:28
Speaker
and your three biggest concerns for the company, not your group, right? Legal, but the company, the latter three, the three biggest concerns should not be we're really busy or the food sucks, right? It should be something that's existential, right? On gross margins or such, you know, our, our sales growth is not a target, something that really we need to keep an eye on. Okay.
00:28:54
Speaker
Do those change often, Seth? Sorry to interrupt you, but do those change very frequently or are those consistent week in week out? Those do not change frequently. Like every six to 12 weeks, I expect one of the three to fall apart or fall off the calendar or fall off the list. And if they change all the time, then we have too many concerns prioritizing them, right? Both are true. And then the three most important things you're working on, while there might be carryover, if we're doing a round of financing,
00:29:25
Speaker
Right. It's going to be there. Right. And if we're doing a massive strategic deal, it's going to be there for the five weeks. It's an active deal. And if you put those three most important things, you know, your teammates on that X axis again, know what you're doing and know what questions to ask. Right. Yes.
00:29:46
Speaker
That's great. I think that leads very nicely into the conversation about the executive coaching practice
The Transition to Executive Coaching and Certification Process
00:29:53
Speaker
that you've built. You started to do this just before you joined Marketa. What inspired you to become a coach and also how did you do that while also building up the legal team at Marketa and running an IPO and two questions in there. I guess there's a deep answer there too. I'll be vulnerable and share it.
00:30:12
Speaker
I decided to become certified as a coach or accredited as a coach because when I look back at my career, I started getting coached in 2004, you know, it was valuable then. And then at SolarCity where I didn't know what I was doing, right? When I got there in an industry, no one had done before and we were hyper growth, you know, a hundred percent growth year over year for seven plus years. I mean, when I joined, we were 200 people. When I left, we were 14,000.
00:30:41
Speaker
Oh, wow. Yeah. I mean, that's really hard. And yeah, I knew that if I, when you think about the Kager of an organization, the compounding annual growth rate of an organization in the revenue, that's your personal Kager. Like how much are you investing in yourself? I knew I wasn't going to make it if I didn't work on myself. I knew. And so I doubled down on getting coached.
00:31:07
Speaker
all the time regularly by a great coach. Her name was Karen Jandorf at that time. I worked with a different coach before Karen then worked with her partner and then with her starting in SolarCity. And at the end of my tenure there, I thought this was the key, like investing in myself and my ability to lead and manage and building my EQ. This was the thing that got me through the eight years. And how cool would it be if I had some of these skills? Yeah.
00:31:36
Speaker
And maybe it might even be a second career someday or a third career someday And so I found a coaching program. I went back to school So between solar city and marchetta I took a two and a half year sabbatical I went to coaching school in marin county at cti coaches training international I became as credited as a co-active coach. It took me 15 months from day one to passing my exams
00:32:05
Speaker
and my oral exams and my written exams and the whole thing. I didn't love going back to school and I loved the curriculum. Then I built a small practice because you have to build a practice to become accredited. You have to have actual hours to do it. You have to record your clients and you get critiqued on your client, your coaching. It's rigorous. Then I got to the road and I had the road forked.
00:32:35
Speaker
I missed leading a team still. Right. And so I'd always made the comment to my clients, I might go back to being a GC. And so I did, and I told them I would never leave them. And so I got in big trouble at home. And the big trouble at home was I spread myself way too thin for a number of years. So I took Marketa Public with a great team of people, great in-house people, great law firm. And I coached on the side.
00:33:05
Speaker
during that as well. And so I say it this way, like when you borrow money from your credit card, it's like a really high interest rate. Yeah. When you borrow time from your marriage and your family, it's an extraordinarily high rate of interest and you better start paying it back really quickly or it'll come badly. And I think I'm blessed that my wife, Margaret, my daughter, Amanda were really patient with me.
00:33:35
Speaker
because I worked too hard and I know I put too much of myself out there.
00:33:40
Speaker
Thank you for sharing that story. Talk us through the certification process for becoming a coach. Because I suspect a number of folks who are listening will think, you know, I would love to work with Seth because of his GC experience or his experience leading teams, right? Perhaps as opposed to because of the frameworks he learned in the certification process. But I think that those are probably pretty important too. And those are what set you up to actually be able to build a practice as opposed to
00:34:05
Speaker
offer a little bit of candidate advice here or there. To tell us a little bit about what that certification process actually looks like or what was most important for you to learn as a part of that. Yeah, CTI where I was accredited basically says that
00:34:21
Speaker
you know, start from the principle of people are creative, resourceful, and whole, which means that most folks know the answers to most of their questions inside, right? When a person, like, you know, to compromise that, when someone says to you, I've been in this relationship for four years, you know, I don't know if I want to stay in it. Well, kind of know what they want. They're just having trouble pulling the trigger.
00:34:48
Speaker
one way or the other, like they're having trouble committing or having trouble removing themselves from it. And the answer is somewhere in their heart and they're blocked from making the decision. So coach through that. It's the same way you would coach someone and say, I have an employee, right? Their work is great, but they're angry at their coworkers and they're not getting along. How do I talk to them? How do I explore that? That's a coaching conversation.
00:35:16
Speaker
more than a consulting conversation. Well, how do you see them? How do you feel them? What are you noticing? And all of a sudden the answers start coming out. So you start from coaching from that perspective, and it's only the last five or 10% that you should ever bring in your practical experience yourself. And I literally do this in the meeting. I'll be like, I'm taking off my coaching hat and adding a personal experience.
00:35:46
Speaker
Right for you to just have as a reference point And i'm not attached to whether that's right for you or not. It's just a reference point for me in a similar situation Interesting and that's really important. And so almost any coach can coach any person But they can't consult so we're taught to be coaches and not consultants The business is weisman coaching and consulting not consulting and coaching for a reason
00:36:16
Speaker
Because I really want to stay in that open-ended inquiry method where I don't think I know the answer or I think maybe you do that and we start there.
00:36:29
Speaker
If we go back to one of your earlier points, which is that we agree that people are people, right? They're not sort of, I don't know, drones working within a business. You know, your clients are people too. How do you make sure that your coaching engagements with folks
00:36:48
Speaker
don't turn into therapy sessions. And I say that I ask that question honestly, because, you know, the problems that they're bringing to you are not just a logic game, right? They're actually probably emotional and tied up in their relationships with the folks who they work with or their investors or whomever. Yeah. How do you work to make sure that you don't become a therapist? Yeah, thanks. It's a great question. I'm not a therapist and I don't want to be one. Right. And
00:37:18
Speaker
I think that the demarcation line, you know, in therapy is that therapists will talk about your childhood a lot. I draw a demarcation line in the recent present, you know, a few months ago, Hey, this happened at work, like that matter. And not when I was 13, you know, I had bad hair and bad skin. We're not having my conversation. And it's not therapy to hear people's frustrations.
00:37:47
Speaker
and to hear their worries and their concerns, and to validate them. When someone says, look, my board has run amok, and they're doing this and they're doing that, my first response should be, that sounds really hard. I hear what you're saying, and I understand that that's really hard. And then I go into what you're thinking on what's behind that, what you're thinking on why that board member is doing what they're doing, what your understanding of their goals,
00:38:17
Speaker
understanding of their investment. And we start to ask questions. So immediately I have validated the fear, the doubt, the uncertainty, and we immediately move into, okay, how are we going to move this forward? And what actions will we take to remedy the situation we're in? Does that make sense?
00:38:36
Speaker
It does. Yeah. It's empathetic, but it is still forward looking and it's rooted much more in the present than what a psychologist or someone would bring to the table. Yeah. You know that you are coaching when you are in the space where you're asking open-ended curious questions about what to do. And you know, you're in the space of consulting when you say, here's what I would do.
00:39:06
Speaker
Sure. It's, you know, if you think, you know, the answer, you are not coaching in that moment. You are consulting. Yeah. Can you tell us what a typical coaching engagement looks like? I'm just curious. And I think that a lot of people out there are curious for if they went and they worked with an executive coach, what might it actually look like practically? I think a lot of it depends on where you are. I coach in three very distinct buckets.
00:39:32
Speaker
CEOs of private companies between sort of B-stage and public. GCs, you know, that's another large bucket and then law firm partners. Those three buckets are the first I spend most of my time. A lot of the engagement depends on where you are in your career in those three buckets and whether you're working or about to leave a position. I think there is developmental coaching in any of those buckets.
00:40:00
Speaker
I'm a first-time CEO. I'm a first-time GC. How do I build and lead a team? What kind of behaviors do I need to exhibit? How do I make people feel sane and heard, right? Or partner at a law firm? How do I build and build the business? How do I lead associates in 2023 in return to your office? And how does Ghibli want to be led? And then there's the folks who say, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up anymore. I don't like what I'm doing.
00:40:29
Speaker
And that's transitional coaching. And there's a specific sort of transitional coaching usually runs between six and nine months. And there's like a book that we read at the beginning of transitional coaching, which is transitions by William Bridges. And we talk about how to be in transition and we coach through it. And there's exercises I've built. One of them is on my blog for how to define what you want in life. And it's one of the most pure coaching experiences you can have is transitional coaching.
00:41:00
Speaker
And then a lot of my clients just tend to stay with me. And if they aren't coaching as frequently, they go to what I'll call maintenance coaching, which is twice a month or every week, they'll go to once a month and they'll just check in and we'll become collaborative thought partners rather because they built to scale. They've built their team. They have a sense of mastery over their job now, you know, and that's lovely. I love those, you know, I've known them four or five years.
00:41:28
Speaker
They've returned to their goals and it warms my heart.
00:41:33
Speaker
I frequently hear actually from GCs who say that they want an executive coach or they, you know, think that they may want to explore this. There's usually two questions that follow that I get asked, and I'm curious for what your view is on it being in the field. One, how do I find an executive coach? How do I find someone who fits me? And well, moreover, but like, how do I even, there's no list out there of who are all the executive coaches.
00:41:59
Speaker
and now I will often send them to Seth. Second, I'm curious for your view on this too, is it worth the money? Oftentimes, they'd prefer to go to their CEO and say, hey, can I have this as a part of my package? I think I really would benefit from this, need this. How do you respond to those questions when people ask you? The first one is the easier one.
00:42:28
Speaker
Someone in your network knows someone. Just googling executive coach in your industry, you'll find someone in your network who's working with that coach. Go ask your 10 closest network friends. If you're the GC, go ask the 10 GCs you trust most. Go talk to your CHRO. The CHRO knows coaches. That's a bloody wick.
00:42:57
Speaker
Either of those places were out there. You didn't ask and I'll add it. Sometimes people feel like they need to have a coach that's done their job. I'm the CEO. I need a CEO coach. I'm a GC coach. You don't. You need that for a consultant, but not necessarily coaching. So don't get caught up in that. Is it worth it?
00:43:25
Speaker
That's up to the person who's, you know, the market value of anything is what a willing bidder is willing to pay for it at a time and place, right? Sure. There's, there's my snarky, you know, economist answer. I think that if you think about investing, again, back to the investment I made of myself all those years ago and the, you know, what will differentiate you from your peers in any job you have?
00:43:52
Speaker
There are really smart people everywhere. They are all over the place, right? So if you're trying to be the smartest person in the room, good luck to you. There's only one of those and the rest of the room is not. Okay, so that's cool. If you want to outwork everybody, you could do that and that won't scale as you lead teams, right? What is the most likely touchstone? Like what is the most likely indicator of your success? It's EQ.
00:44:19
Speaker
We know that, that now 25 years into that, emotional intelligence has the highest correlative predictive of great success. And coaching is fundamentally about building the four facets of EQ. And they are in order from the ground up, self-awareness, self-regulation, those are the personal competencies. And then the relational competencies, which are relational awareness,
00:44:46
Speaker
relational management, the last one, but the golden ring as it were. If you get good at those things, you're way ahead of your peers. If you get great at them, you're elite. To me, that's what you're investing in fundamentally. Does that make sense? It does.
00:45:07
Speaker
The more and more that we talk about this, the more I think that I need a coach coach always have a coach. And the interesting thing now about my coach is that we've moved from how do I lead my team and how do I manage my team to how do I be a better coach? So she's coaching me about my coaching. Yeah.
00:45:29
Speaker
One last question for you on coaching, if you're willing to answer it, sure. What are the, what comes to mind when you think of the thorniest problems that your coach helped you solve maybe back when you were in the GC role? Wow. I think that there's a theme to that and it's both a personal theme and a management theme or leadership theme, both management or leadership or different things.
00:45:59
Speaker
Sure. Here's the thing I've learned to be true for all human beings, every single person I've ever met, they all have a voice in their head. Not a dangerous one, but you know, sometimes it can be slightly dangerous. And in different modalities, it's called the inner critic or the roommate or the saboteur and CTI coaching, it's called your saboteur. And that voice in your head is so critical.
00:46:27
Speaker
It is so destructive. It is the one when you spill something says, you're being dummy. I can't believe you did that. Talk to me. I did that yesterday. And you're like, ah, I can't believe how, and you're harsh with yourself in a way that if your partner did it or your friend did it, you'd be like, Oh my God, don't talk to me that way. That's our mind. And
00:46:55
Speaker
we don't have control over our minds. We think we do and we do not. And so understanding our internal narrative, right? Self-awareness back to, you know, getting at an EQ is critical if we want to have any understanding of other people's internal narrative and listening for their critic or their saboteur. You know, we all know the employee,
00:47:23
Speaker
who is really, really good at what they do and scared to take on more responsibility. They're definitely frightened of it. Well, what's behind that? That's the thorniest issue, is being creating the safe space where they can say, I'm afraid to fail. What would this failure look like? Why are you afraid? And how can I help you through that? And being empathetic and open to that for yourself and for others
00:47:52
Speaker
that's almost always the thorniest thing is dealing with those saboteurs and recognizing them in yourself and in others. Seth, as we start to wrap up a few fun questions for you, I hope you found the other ones fun as well. These are a little lighter.
00:48:11
Speaker
You did a story earlier about driving on a track and keeping your eyes focused on the track in front of you, not on the wall or the overgrown grass or what have you. I've heard from a mutual friend of ours that you like to drive fast cars around tracks yourself. Tell us a little bit about that hobby. Yeah. So it's called High Performance Driving Events. It's the first prize is bringing home your shiny car.
00:48:41
Speaker
as your shiny car. And they say that's the beginning of every event. So I like to do that four or five times a year. I've been doing it for 20, 20 plus years now. My wife sent me to racing school and then I started taking my own car to the track four or five times a year. And it is, it is a great moment of being present. It teaches you concentration. It teaches you that to go faster, you have to slow down and be very thoughtful.
00:49:10
Speaker
Driving really fast is about slowing down and being very intentional about each turn and what you're going to do and how you're going to place the car and balance the car. It is really hard to do well, really hard. And you're never perfect, ever. And so I love the challenge and it is incredibly mentally and physically exhausting. I love doing it.
00:49:35
Speaker
I'm sure. Yeah. You see, you see those drivers get out of cars and they're just like drenched in sweat and it, yeah. Even in my street car, I'm sore the next day from all enough because, you know, trying to hang onto a wheel and trying to stay in your seatbelt, you know, 130, 140 miles an hour or doing 80 miles an hour in a turn. That's hard when these folks in racing do three or four G's it's stunning. So I just have a massive amount of respect for those folks.
00:50:04
Speaker
And I think that racing teaches me things all the time about incremental improvement and being imperfect and slowing down. When folks watch the next season of a drive to survive on Netflix, they'll have a, they'll have a whole new lens on it. One post on my blog about racing in life. I love it. It's inspired me, but I love drives to survive. Love it.
00:50:27
Speaker
we will include a link to that in the show notes. Now I'm going to ask you for a couple of book recommendations. You actually mentioned one earlier about folks who are in transition. So if you want to use that one again, you can. But I'm curious, a book that you think will help people in their careers. And then I'm also just curious for an interesting book that if you've had time to read something recently, you've read recently. Yeah, I do a lot of nonfiction reading. I'm fine. I'm voracious that way.
00:50:57
Speaker
The first book I pick up for everybody, the first book almost all my clients get is Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni, or What Got You Here Won't Get You There by Marshall Goldsmith. One of those two books, almost all of my clients get both of those books early in the coaching relationship. They are critical. The Goldsmith book is about EQ and the building blocks of beginning EQ.
00:51:25
Speaker
The Legione book goes back to that conversation we had about what team are you on and how do great teams function together. And that's where the foundation of trust discussion I had with you comes from, from that model. I think it is just a phenomenal model that every leader should know. So those are the two business books that everyone really needs to check out. The last fun book I read was Demon Copperhead. I can't remember the author's name. It's a book about
00:51:54
Speaker
a young man growing up in Virginia amongst the opioid crisis in America. And while it's very historic, it's accurate historical fiction, based on David Copperfield for its inspiration in terms of the characters and the character arc.
00:52:12
Speaker
That sounds super interesting. I might have to pick that up. One of the lucky things with all the travel that I get to do to see GCs all around the country is I have, I usually have a rule, which is I'm going to spend at least an hour of the flight reading a book and relaxing. And it means that I'm plowing through two or three books a month, which is amazing. I've never read this much in my life before. Look, I think that books in my coaching practice, books are an enormous resource. There's,
00:52:37
Speaker
brilliance there that you can digest directly from the source from the author or I can do a poor job of relating to you and so it's remarkable how much we can grow on our own and learn from the mistakes of others by reading books a Last question for you if you could go back in time and offer your younger lawyer self a piece of advice What might it be?
00:53:07
Speaker
Hmm. I think there's so much I'd like to talk to myself about so many things I'd like to, you know, be more empathetic. I think it would probably be, be much more empathetic with yourself and compassionate with yourself. I have this perfectionist streak and my sub-eter narrative of perfection and, you know, self-flagellation, you know, I thought
00:53:34
Speaker
I thought it motivated me. I thought it made me a better everything. And what it was, it slowed me down. It made me sad. It made it hard for me to focus. It made me less joyful in everything I did. So I wish I had been more compassionate with myself. The other side of that is I wish I had started going to therapy and been coached earlier in my life. I wish I had worked on myself. Yeah. I didn't come from the best of backgrounds. And so I really wish I had started working at myself earlier.
00:54:04
Speaker
So I would have gone back to an earlier version and said, hey, it doesn't have to be like this. You can work through it.
00:54:11
Speaker
I think that's actually given all that we've covered today and what you do today, what motivates you, that's a fantastic place to end our conversation. Seth, thank you so much for joining us and listeners. Hope to see you next time on the next episode of The Abstract. Thanks for listening. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It was wonderful. Thank you.
00:54:43
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in today. Don't forget to subscribe so you can get notified as soon as we post a new episode. And if you liked this one, I'd really love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a rating or a comment. If you'd like to reach out to me or our guest, our LinkedIn profiles are in the description. See you all next week.