Transcription
Mark:
Welcome to PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. I’m Mark Feffer.
My guest today is Christine Tao, the co-founder and CEO of Sounding Board. They’re a leader development platform that combines solution design, software, people to people development and data and insights. We’re going to talk about coaching and technology, the role of data, tailoring, coaching to the individual and more, all on this edition of PeopleTech.
Hey Christine, welcome. Sounding Board calls itself a coaching management platform, what’s that mean?
Christine Tao:
Great question. I think it reflects how much we’ve continued to evolve. The latest iteration is that we really think of ourselves as a leader development platform of which a part of that platform is a coach management system. And so, in very plain language, our entire solution is all about democratizing access to leadership coaching and doing that at scale through technology. Part of that is end-to-end delivery we do of coaching, and we do that virtually, in one-on-one and group coaching models. The other piece and the latest solution that we’ve brought to market as part of the platform is our coach management software. And so, what that does is it gives our customers the same technology that we have used to be able to really scale leadership coaching at every level, but now they get access to those same administrative tools, whether it’s automated workflows, scheduling, coach matching, or a very complete digital user experience. And they can utilize that software whether or not they use our coaching network to deliver the coaching. Does that make sense?
Mark:
It does. But obviously your coaches or your set of coaches is a big part of the equation here, and I’ve seen material from Sounding Board that talks about how different your coaches are. What is it about your universe of coaches, I guess, that’s so different from others?
Christine Tao:
The first one is very simple, it’s just that our coaches only focus on providing leadership development in coaching. If you look across the landscape today, Mark, you’ll see that coaching is being applied in a wide variety of use cases, whether it’s mental health, wellness, return to work, DEI, but for us, our coaches are primarily just focused on leader development and it’s really all about helping companies uplevel their talent through upleveling their leadership skills. The second really is if you look at a lot of coaching organizations, both historically and today, most of them have operated as pretty loose marketplaces, meaning, they recruit and bring a large number of coaches together and then they use technology to match those coaches to the different leaders or the different employees that they’re working with.
Outside of that, the connection the coaches have to the organizations are pretty loose, meaning, they might be coaching in their same methodology that they do in their private practice, they might bring the same frameworks that they have that they’ve used across multiple clients. We call ourselves a managed network, and so we’ve intentionally built our coaching community to actually be smaller, but what we ask our coaches to do is to commit a larger amount of their time and their capacity to Sounding Board, and in turn, Sounding Board also commits to them an incredible amount of development, mentorship, supervision, as well as of course clientele to fill up their roster. And what we found over time is that that creates just a much higher fidelity to our methodology, our brand of coaching, and ensures that there’s a consistency in quality to that experience for the end user that really translates into higher impact.
Mark:
Not too long ago, I think you gave your coaches stock options, basically. Can you tell me about the rationale behind that? I mean, I don’t think that done very often in your situation, so I’d just like to hear about why.
Christine Tao:
Yeah. First of all, I don’t think it has been done. When we announced that we were providing equity grants for our coaches, we were the first company, and I believe we’re the only company in the field that’s doing that, and it’s related to what I had talked about before that how we’ve built our coaching community in our network of coaches differently. And it comes back to this idea of commitment and its commitment to each other. And so the founding story for Sounding Board is that my co-founder, Lori, actually was my coach at my last company. And so, she really comes from this background of being a coach first and really understanding what it takes and what it means to be a really high impact coach.
And so for us, we think that our coaches, as much as the technology is really helping to deliver and scale that experience to thousands of people, at the heart of that experience really is our coaches. And for us, we felt like it was something we really wanted to do that as the company has grown and scaled over the last few years, given how much our coaches have helped us drive that growth, we also wanted to be able to have them share in the success of the company as we grew.
Mark:
How did they receive it? I mean, were they surprised or just happy?
Christine Tao:
I mean, I think they’re certainly surprised because unfortunately what we’re seeing happen in the industry is technology has come into play across multiple industries, is that sometimes that can come at the expense of the workforce that’s delivering that. And so, I do think that they were surprised and the response has really been overwhelmingly positive. It’s really raised the awareness of Sounding Board and how we do things differently amongst the coaching community. And I think it’s really helped us show that, as an organization, we walk the talk, we say that we invest in our coaches, we say that we’re committed to our coaches and equity grants are just another way of showing and actually walking the talk behind that commitment.
Mark:
Switching gears a bit, I’ve seen the phrase technology enabled coaching, could you tell me what that is, and how you fit into that?
Christine Tao:
Yeah. I think in very simple terms, if you think about a lot of, say, industries that started out primarily as service industries, when I started working with the coach, my coach Lori would fly up from Southern California to Northern California where I was spaced to see me in-person. And so, really the initial premise behind Sounding Board was given the prevalence of technology and how it was transforming a lot of industries, could we use technology to deliver this experience in a virtual format? So very simple, meaning just like you can see telemedicine or virtual healthcare. We at Sounding Board are effectively giving you virtual access to a leadership coach and it’s disrupting that model where it used to only happen in person. As we’ve seen with COVID and the pandemic, that moved to remote work suddenly became ubiquitous versus something that was only experienced by a few percentage of the workforce.
Now, that seems very normal for you and I to be having a conversation like we are today virtually versus in-person. And so where the technology continues to drive us is as you think about a model like this of personalized development getting adopted much more broadly across an organization, how do you use technology to make that experience more seamless? How do you use technology and data to give more context to that equation, to bring more insights and data and reporting back to the organization? These were all things that were missing from the leadership coaching industry before where it was pretty opaque. And so technology can actually transform every aspect of that experience, which is pretty exciting.
Mark:
And how do you define the difference or what is the difference between coaching and training, say?
Christine Tao:
Yeah, that’s a great question. And I think even just last week, I was on a advisory board meeting about the future of coaching, and I still find that there is a lot of differences in understanding about the difference in coaching and training. At Sounding Board, the way that we think about coaching versus training, one, is that training often is about delivering content, it’s a very structured in telling somebody how to do something. I go through training to understand how to utilize certain software or to learn certain skills about my job. So there is a very prescribed approach to that. I think a big difference with coaching and the way that we think about it at Sounding Board really is that coaching, especially leadership development where it’s around these capabilities and skills that require a lot of context, how you lead in one team or one organization may differ.
Coaching really is about through questions and through probing how do you get somebody to uncover those right answers or right approaches and strategies for their context. So it’s very situational. And what we find is that if you can do that and help that leader get to that answer on their own through these types of interactions, what you can do is uncover much deeper mindsets and thinkings and beliefs that are driving behaviors, and you can have a much more profound on impacting those behaviors so that they can be sustained for a longer term.
Mark:
When they think about coaching, I think a lot of people look at on it as something that’s forward-looking, it’s making you a better manager, it’s making you a more effective executive. Is it ever appropriate to use coaching for some kind of remedial purpose?
Christine Tao:
Well, at Sounding Board, certainly we really focus on how do you help that leader move forward. Because I think a big difference is if you’re talking about someone that is not meeting performance expectations or having to correct behaviors, I think the right question to ask is, where should that feedback and then the responsibility for that development lie? I would argue that that’s probably the job of your manager and your leader, because their job really is to manage your performance within your role, within that team, within the organization. Certainly coaching can help. So I wouldn’t say that coaching isn’t a tool in the tool set that you can utilize, but what I want to ensure that companies think about is it’s not a replacement for the work of a manager to manage the performance of their team and their employees.
Mark:
There’s been a lot of changes in the business world, the technology world over the last few years. Do you think that coaching has kept up? I don’t want to say programs, I guess the efforts that you’re doing, are they as effective as they were in, say, 2019?
Christine Tao:
So I would actually argue that as the pace of change has increased in companies, that coaching has actually become an even more critical model for development for today’s leaders. I’ll give you example. If you think about even myself, so I came out of Google and some of the large technology companies here in the Bay Area. If you said 10 years ago, what was the natural development path for someone, you got promoted to a certain level and then you’d get some training right around how to lead at that level, how to run and manage your team. And it was all standardized and did not change probably too much year to year in terms of the concepts and things that you were learning. I think the challenge with that type of approach now is if I look at my job today and even the job of the managers on my team, six months ago, they might have been doing something that today they actually have to shift and do differently.
And so, the challenge with trying to follow a standardized curriculum or a model that has been developed for years is that it doesn’t actually reflect what’s happening around the leader, like you were saying, more uncertainty, more change. That’s the beauty of coaching, because I just finished in a session with my coach, what could I do? I could bring in very specific context from what was happening to me literally in the last two weeks, and we could work through that same concepts of feedback of how to improve performance, how to get more out of my team. But now I’m actually able to apply that for something that’s happening for me right now, and I do think that with the level of change we’re seeing in organizations, that type of approach to development is really critical for leaders because they need their immediate problems or their immediate challenge to be met as they are learning those concepts that they can continue to apply two, three, a year, three months down the road, a year down the road.
Mark:
Well, Christine, thanks very much for stopping by today. It’s been great to talk to you.
Christine Tao:
Well, thank you so much, Mark, and look forward to more conversations about coaching. We’re definitely seeing a big, big ground swell of interest from organizations for this type of approach as they are and as we are heading into a continued uncertainty in the market.
Mark:
That would be great.
My guest today has been Christine Tao, co-founder and CEO of Sounding Board, and this has been PeopleTech, the podcast of the HCM Technology Report. We’re a publication of RecruitingDaily. We’re also a part of Evergreen Podcasts. To see all of their programs, visit www.evergreenpodcasts.com. And to keep up with HR technology, visit the HCM Technology Report every day. We’re the most trusted source of news in the HR tech industry. Find us at www.hcmtechnologyreport.com. I’m Mark Feffer.
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