On Coaching and Mentoring - Shopify
It has always puzzled me. How do people like CEOs or other leaders make progress? Yes, they can read books, papers, listen to TED talks or YouTube. This may help them to be aware of a different view about the world or opinions about certain topics. But to make a behaviour change in taking a decision at work, a book alone might not be helpful. Because books are a terrible medium to hold attention to and make a change in one specific area. The context of the reader, experience and other invisible factors are not known to a book writer.
I have huge respect for the company, Shopify. They are truly a giant in the e-commerce space. They enable millions of people to sell and ship things online. In many ways, a true competitor for Amazon who can swallow and scoop up any businesses.
How did this happen? Tobi Lutke, a German interested in web-design, had built this huge Shopify empire in a decade and a half.
I don’t remember which podcast, but I heard that Shopify spent tons of resources in its early days on executive coaching and mentoring. When they were 150 employees, they used to hire more than 70 coaches or something like that.
I recently got a chance to ask Tobi about it in a Twitter AMA. His response was simply candid and useful.
Tobi was a CTO before he became a CEO. He took the help of an executive coach to make this transition. His team and company also had coaches to help them. They, in fact, have permanent coaches in Shopify to help their personal development. Tobi highly recommends coaching for anyone to have a higher return in improvement in any area.
Another example from Twitter is Tiago Forte. Tiago gets coached on fitness, publishing, bookkeeping, finances and so on.
Let us say that I wanted to improve in fitness. I can read blogs, books, listen to podcasts, do experiments on myself. I might get returns, as I will be iterating and improving my mindset. I might save tons of money. But I would have spent a lot of time on this. The tips might work or not, based on my context. My body, my habits and my location.
If I invest in a nutrition coach and a strengthening coach, I cut down the time taken for the effects. A coach’s advantage is that she has seen a lot of people similar to me. So it becomes like a pattern matching approach to start with and improve based on my feedback. Sure, good coaches cost money, but they save time. Going beyond such simple statements, a good coach will 10x your performance in whatever area you want to focus on.