(interview blurb)
Todd: Try different things and if you’re really interested in developing, build a community of people that are also interested in that and are trying different things, and you’ll just learn so much and evolve so much faster and you’ll do it together.
(intro)
Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today coaches for the positive impact that leaders can have on others when they embody their values and take ownership for how they show up in the world. He has witnessed this time and time again when coaching in Fortune 500 companies, government organizations, educational institutions, and athletics organizations. He specializes in working with leaders on expanding their personal and interpersonal awareness and improving their ability to make values-driven business decisions. This professional certified coach is passionate about giving back, he steadily volunteers to teach emotional intelligence classes inside of Rhode Island’s prisons, and has provided free workforce readiness coaching to individuals returning from incarceration.
(interview)
Alex: Please welcome Todd Iarussi. Hi, Todd.
Todd: Hey. Thanks for having me, Alex. Appreciate it.
Alex: It’s a pleasure to have you. Thank you for being here. So, as we start all of our Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee episodes, what are we drinking today, Todd?
Todd: Well, I’m drinking decaf. I made the bold move early this year to get off of all caffeine so I’m almost through with six months. First month wasn’t very fun but in more of a rhythm now so it’s coffee with kind of like bloated with some other spices and almond milk in there and stuff. It’s good enough.
Alex: Good, but, I mean, decaf still has caffeine, I’m sure you know that.
Todd: Just a little bit, not quite as much as it used to.
Alex: Nice. Yeah, I never was a coffee drinker so it’s interesting that our podcast is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, but I do like coffee and I drink like a couple times a week. It wires me too much but it’s good for a podcast so you’re super aware and awake. So, well, I don’t know, we can talk about awareness and caffeine and maybe it’s the opposite, right? It makes you maybe a little too jittery. But it’s a pleasure to have you here today. So, I’m excited to talk to you about all things stage development, adult development theory work. I know you’ve done a lot of work in that area. So, before we get started, I just want to hear from you a little bit more about how you ended up where you are today doing the coaching work that you do. So tell us about your journey.
Todd: Sure, and thanks for asking and I’m super impressed that you can just have a little bit of caffeine here or there. I rarely hear that. Usually, people are all in or all out so good for you, especially in building an organization. Yeah, I started pretty far away from coaching. I was a pre-med undergrad and then went into investment banking out of school so two areas pretty far from it, but I kind of woke up to this idea of leadership development as a thing. When I was a senior in college, I was captain of my college baseball team and graduated that year, we fell just short of a championship and I looked back and said what kind of leader was I? No one talked to me about this, there was no intentions around it, it was just, “Okay, you’re captain now, go lead them.” And I looked back at that and thought it was just this huge missed opportunity. I didn’t know what to do about it. Development wasn’t a big thing, sports psych wasn’t a big thing, coaching wasn’t a big thing. This is like late 90s, early 2000s. So I just kind of tagged that as, “Ooh, big missed opportunity here. This leadership thing, what is it and how do you do it?” And then I did three years of investment banking and transitioned from that with my old banking boss to a retained executive search and that was kind of the next place where leadership became a big thing. I was assessing leaders, I think I interviewed 1,000 during that time over that eight-year period and so I thought about leadership from the perspective of how are these individuals leading and how do I assess them in that, and then was thinking about leadership from the inside of our firm as well. We were growing and so I ended up in a leadership role and, again, found myself in the how do you keep people — if people are quitting, why? And how do you keep them engaged and happy at work? And what does that mean for my own development? And then was thinking about it, hearing from all these heads of HR that were talking about cultural challenges at there organizations and looking from the outside to fill those needs with new leadership and wondering why aren’t they developing that internally or what would it take to do that. So, it just started — leadership development kept surrounding me in these challenges and questions and then the big wake up moment was meeting my first executive coach about seven or eight years into that. I didn’t really know it was a field, I knew about Tony Robbins, I knew about that kind of performance coaching, but I didn’t know this was a thing you could actually do. And so I met him. He was the vice chairman of a larger executive coaching company that we had partnered with to be more of a full-service firm. And one day, he pulled me aside and he goes, “I don’t know what you’re doing on this assessment side, you seem super interested in the development side, we should talk,” and so he took me under his wing and I’ve been doing it ever since in some version, so I was super grateful to that individual for helping in that way. And then also realizing how long a journey it can be to actually be able to support a leader under pressure in their development in the arena. So it was a roundabout journey but I’m happy to be here now.
Alex: So tell me a little bit more about that transition from assessment to development.
Todd: There was an interesting move in between where this organization was doing these whole person assessments where the spiritual dimension and the emotional dimension were two of the six that they were looking at and they were working with CEOs, Fortune 500 companies, and so, in talking to that person, we thought we were really trying to think about leadership in the country as a whole and how big the gap felt between what could be at these organizations and institutions and what was and where are those nodal points, like those little entry points that would have the biggest impact, and we both got to higher education, like that four-year residential period could be really transformative in this incredible ground to develop future leaders and we felt like that wasn’t happening to the extent. There’s a lot of knowledge acquisition there but not necessarily the deep transformative personal development that you could have when you have people in residence for that long. And so my hair was on fire a little bit at that point and I wanted to return to my alma mater, Brown, because they had a contemplative studies department, it was an initiative at the time, but I said, okay, here’s a place where you have academic rigor going on in the arts, sciences, and humanities under the umbrella of contemplative studies. Students are meditating in meditation labs. There’s a huge athletic department so a place really invested in leadership and team building. There’s also this social entrepreneurship initiative there so another place. So I felt like that could be this hub for me to help create this mindful leadership revolution. I had a lot of ego, I wanted to help but I also felt like I, in part, could be the one that helps to do this at a big scale starting there. And so I went back to Brown and met the head of contemplative studies and just said, “I’m quitting my job, would you be willing to just let me come to your meetings for a little while?” and so they let me in so I was with all these amazing professors every couple of weeks and starting to infuse this idea of mindful leadership there. And I ended up getting a very small part-time job in that department after a year of being an alumni squatter, so to speak, and developed amazing relationships, got some things going, nothing anywhere near what the vision was. I discovered, Alex, that things move a little bit slower at higher ed than they do in the business world, especially with new things like this. But the people that I met, like it brought me to where I am today, it brought me to my first leadership development organization through the connections there so it ended up being worthwhile. It was an amazing learning experience but very stressful trying to create my own job at a school that already — it’s already hard enough to fund positions that they have slated, let alone a brand new mindful leadership position for some guy out of the business world.
Alex: Absolutely. Well, that’s a really interesting journey and it’s just — as you were talking about spirituality in the context of at Brown, makes me think about spirituality in the context of corporate America or business, to make it more broad and global. I think people struggle to find that spiritual identity in the workplace. So even today, where we talk about meditation, meditation and spirituality can go hand in hand but they also can be completely different things, so you could be using, let’s say, the Headspace app to be engaging in some meditations but it’s just not a transcendent spiritual, vertical experience, it’s just something you do to relax. So, yeah, let’s unpack spirituality in the workplace.
Todd: Sure.
Alex: I am a deeply spiritual person and I have a hard time talking about spirituality in the context of work, because they seem like very distinct endeavors but, at the same time, if we’re going to get humanity where we eventually want it to go, those are going to have to come together in one way or another right. So it seems like we’re at the beginning of that journey.
Todd: Yeah, and I don’t really talk about spirituality much with clients, with organizations really at all. Occasionally, if someone brings it in, I’ll follow them and say, “Tell me more about your spiritual life,” but, otherwise, my access point is thinking about the person as a whole person and what does that mean to them and how are the different parts of their life going. And so just looking for a really accessible entry point. And then, as we talked about before, adult development theory or ego development theory, that kind of idea of stages, there’s stages of development that we can move through, that’s another landing spot and I wouldn’t necessarily call it spiritual, even though there’s a spiritual domain that might get assessed in that. It’s really looking at the whole person. So that’s the way I access it.
Alex: The higher bands of stage theory get into that kind of spiritual realm and a lot of those are still unfolding. And before I get all excited about those higher stages of development, let’s bring it back. So part of why I wanted you to join us at the podcast is you’ve done a lot of really great work around applying stage development work in your coaching, you have focus on adult development theory so a lot of coaches that I know know about stage development and more coaches, I think, that I talked to are really not super well versed with adult development theories and stage development, it’s one of my favorite areas to study, to read, to think about. And I think, as coaches, we can definitely benefit by understanding adult development. I mean, what we do as coaches is helping people develop but, oftentimes, we spend time creating competence around certain areas that are applicable to people in the workplace where you can help them with, let’s say, emotional intelligence, communication, strategic thinking, being a little bit more nuanced when you’re thinking about politics in the workplace. I mean, there’s all sorts of very interesting topics that coaches routinely work with their clients, but the under arching foundation of coaching is really around helping people develop and sometimes I’m surprised how little time we spend thinking about these stages of development. And I know some coach training programs really spend a lot of time on that but, as a whole, I think it’s just such a fascinating topic, there’s so much to unpack there and it’s so applicable to working with people, that it’s one of those things that I want us to start thinking about more when we think about coaching, just how does adult development and stage development trickle into that. So let’s start from the basics. So, stage development, how did you first get acquainted with it? What does it mean? What does it mean to you? How do you use it in your practice?
Todd: Yeah, thanks for the question. Yeah, it was around maybe 2009 or ’10. I don’t know how it came to me but I read my first Ken Wilber book and that’s the first time I got exposed to this idea of stages.
Alex: Well, he’s my favorite writer.
Todd: Yeah, I know you love him.
Alex: I love Ken.
Todd: And it’s I think one of the reasons we originally connected. And it was one of those moments where I read — I had been exposed to Buddhist philosophy before, which had a real impact on me, and as an athlete, that idea of training and that idea of stages really resonates with me. And back then, it resonated much more from a competitive, driving how high can I go orientation, but it’s still — and it woke me up. Anyway, and I probably read three or four of his books really quickly and had that glazed over look — I was in New York City at the time, I was taking some grad psychology classes at NYU and I was walking down the street almost in that haze of obsessing about this idea of how do we make the world more integral, and the professor that referred me, his name is Zoran Josipovic, he was studying meditation and neuroscience and fMRI stuff and he’s the one that exposed me and I came back to him with that glazed-over look, like how do we make it all integral, and he just looks at me and goes, “Think of Ken Wilber as an art critic.” He’s like, “Just take it down a notch. Think of him as an art critic, you’re doing some yoga, you’re doing some meditation, you’re doing a little — you’re seeing a therapist, like you’re doing great, you got it covered, don’t be too obsessed with this integral thing.” And so that was the first moment of awakening to it and then realizing like I got to hold this with a lighter hand.
Alex: Well, like Ken says, don’t confuse the map with the territory. I mean, the whole integral approach is really about being integrally informed and it’s about these orienting generalizations, I think he calls it, and it’s just so — you get so immersed in it but then think, okay, take a step back, breathe a little bit, use that lens but don’t become consumed by it.
Todd: Totally, and that just says a lot about where I was as a person in my own development then, attaching to it like that. And then, it wasn’t — I was always curious around then what stage am I at but I didn’t know that you could get measured, I didn’t know how to get measured in that, and then was lucky enough to do, five or so years later, do Georgetown’s leadership coaching certification program —
Alex: Great program.
Todd: — where they felt — yeah, it was amazing and they felt that this stage thing is so important that they have every coach do an assessment there.
Alex: Love that.
23: And I looked around the room and I said, “I’ve been exposed to Buddhist philosophy for 10 years, been doing meditation, I’ve done retreats, I’ve been seeing a therapist for six years, I feel like I’ve done great work there, I’ve been exposed to all these — I’ve done all these wild, contemplative retreats, I’m gonna be so late stage, I’m gonna be the latest stage person in this room,” and then got my results and realize that I was blocked at this earlier stage. I was horrified. I was absolutely horrified by my result and had such like a high concept of myself, was really confused as well, like I’ve done all this, how could I be here? I don’t get it. And did the debrief with the coach who’s done thousands of these things and she really helped me to unlock like some of those ingrained beliefs and meaning making systems and mindsets that, okay, this is why you’re showing up, why you might be showing up here, and here’s ways to move on. And that, more than anything else, was this watershed moment in my own development of holding it more lightly, part two, but really holding it more lately, really looking at myself in a different way, working on myself in a different way, way less obsessively. And then, of course, I moved up since then. So it was really powerful to be exposed to it in that way.
Alex: I think there’s a lot of confusion around what’s the difference between a stage and a state, and, oftentimes, we experience things that it’s more of like a state than like a stage conception that is longer term, it really is part of who you are, and the cool thing about development is that at any stage of development, you can have a state experience that is the very high band of like experience in terms of just your understanding, but it’s a glimpse. And to really solidify it, it’s just really working through the stages. Interestingly enough, one of the few things that’s been known to help people navigate towards higher stages of development is meditation, which is fascinating. Was that part of your journey? Like when you say that you were able to unlock and continue that journey up the spiral of development, what do you mean by that?
Todd: Yeah. Well, I realized that I think my emotional life was the biggest thing that had been stunted without me knowing it. Because in talk therapy, I was talking a lot about how I was feeling, I wasn’t necessarily building a container for experiencing emotion or for landing higher state experiences in a meditation retreat. And I also kind of coopted mindfulness as a way to almost repress a — like I thought by being mindful, not showing emotion, not being reactive was being mindful and that was just this belief that got embedded in my mind, like, oh, that person seems like they can’t control their emotions, they don’t seem very mindful, like I’d think that at retreats or yoga teacher training or whatnot, I’m like, “Oh, that person is totally reactive, they can’t control it.” And so I realized that I’d put this lid on this really rich, one of maybe the most rich part of human life, and once I started to do the work to open that up in different ways, that was a huge catalyst for development for me, and also a place where you can start to land higher state experiences, like through the emotions, through the body, through actually being open to feeling things more fully but without necessarily reacting to them but just really feeling, like that was a big move for me. But that idea of like how do you land higher state experiences, like that’s a really rich topic. I talked to Susanne Cook-Greuter, who’s one of the big people in the adult development theory world and research, and she was talking about like the challenge of when you have a higher state experience, you often interpret it at the level that your ego is then so it becomes this conundrum of you might understand something that’s later but actually at an earlier stage, so it really takes — I’m discovering like eldership community, like people that are experienced in this area, like real intentional work to integrate higher state experiences.
Alex: Yeah, and for those integral theory buffs or geeks, that’s like the Wilber-Combs lattice that breaks down like the state and state experiences and how you experience different states at different stages, but we’ll leave that for the advanced practitioners and hopefully everyone listening in is saying like, “I wanna become an advanced integral practitioner.” So you mentioned somatic work that I think is very powerful, but let’s address one of the criticisms of stage conceptions. In the world that we live in today where there’s increased focus on hierarchies and looking at hierarchies not necessarily as a good thing, you know what I’m tapping into with this criticism. It seems to be very hierarchical, which people interpret as being exclusionary, so there’s all these stages and some are higher than others. So let’s break down that criticism a little bit.
Todd: Yeah. So, hierarchies often are at play, whether we like it or not. If people are being selected for roles or moving up in an organization, there’s some level of hierarchy at play, let alone in just the —
Alex: And that’s our pride saying, now we’re talking a lot about decentralized autonomous organizations, so this idea of having organizations be flat but also make decisions based on a lot of like the people that are involved. It’s like the ultimate vehicle for democracy but, as we know, things are a little bit more complex in practice, but we’re already starting to break that down, that concept of the — I mean, I am actually like four hierarchies and I’ll probably explain why, it’s because if you think that no hierarchy is better than hierarchy, you have a hierarchy, like your hierarchy is no hierarchy is better but you don’t see it, and I think what we need to do is to make hierarchies, evolve them, like understand that — I think Ken Wilber talks about dominator hierarchies versus growth hierarchies, so the universe unfolds in a hierarchical way. Cells come after atoms and they could not exist without atoms so there’s a hierarchical progression of development. Oftentimes, hierarchies get into that dominator state and you see all sorts of dynamics, like the ones that we’ve been trying to unshackle from. You have this legacy of slavery in the world that we’ve really broken that chain over the last couple hundred years, the awareness of just horrifying human experience that we’ve had for millennia, like the world is a very difficult place, humanity was a little — it’s hard to be human in the last couple thousand years, so there’s all this openness to provide more equality and access, which is incredibly fantastic, but we shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, I will say, like, okay, no hierarchy is better, so — now, you can see I care about this topic because it’s —
Todd: Absolutely.
Alex: — it’s really, I think, a powerful — I think integral theory, stage development is so powerful and there’s some pretty strong criticisms about it. So I’d love to hear what you say, now that — I asked you a question and I went straight to like telling you like, “I believe these,” but I do think that that idea of like if you think no hierarchy is better, just take a step back and think about how hierarchical that is and I think that is really an opening of like the pathway to understand like, “Wow, I cannot escape hierarchies, how do we make the world better through understanding them?”
Todd: Yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, I believe in, possibly to a fault, the idea of consciousness and maturity and that if you just ask somebody who are the more mature people in your organization without even giving a definition of that, you’re probably going to get a list of people, there’s just an intuitive understanding of I think maturation and development and so then to just bring some extra rigor to that to ensure that an organization is moving to later stages, if that indeed serves them, like that might undo hierarchy itself. But to just support that idea of development and maturation I think is really important. And stages could help. They might not help but they could help. And so I just feel like holding it with that light hand and letting the consciousness create the structure of the organization. I like that look, personally.
Alex: Yeah. It’s one of the interesting things about the last of the first level of developmental stages and, of course, each model is different and some break down into five, some seven, some eight, but that pluralistic level of development, the one that a lot of people are in today, and if you’re interested, we’ll add in the notes to the podcast some references so that you can look at the stages of development and we’ll add some information to it. But that level seems to be very anti-hierarchical, seems to be, because equality is the overarching focus. And it’s so important, I mean, equality just opens up so many possibilities for so many people that before wouldn’t have those opportunities. But, at the same time, we have to also be careful to understand the role of hierarchies in development and not to necessarily see them as a bad thing but to see how do we enable more people to go up that lattice. But it’s difficult, right? I think that’s where a lot of the world is today, it’s like how do we talk to each other when you’re in different sides of an argument that seems to be very opposed, like the culture wars. At the end of the day, the best way to understand them is to look through those stages of development because they’re very clear-defined personas at those levels.
Todd: Yeah. And just hearing you talk, being in the question together and having that facilitated or facilitating that with a leadership group, I think, is a beautiful way to go into this. Like, ultimately, it’s not about, “Okay, hierarchy or no hierarchy, go, argue about it,” it’s like what serves where are we trying to go, who are we trying to be as an organization, how do we want to people to feel here, what do we want them to experience, and how can we help them develop here and what might that look like? I like that kind of approach, which might end up harvesting the best of both sides of that in some way for that organization or that group of people, but being able to do that in and of itself without the defending but in that questioning together and having healthy conflict rather than unproductive conflict, like that can be a later stage move as well. So I think that’s where sometimes coaches or external consultants or OD people can come in and help an organization really be in those questions and those tensions together to find their best way forward in a way that — ultimately, I care about more people on this planet meeting more needs and more and more people being able to be exposed to development as well.
Alex: Absolutely. So, as a coach or as an OD consultant, as you get well versed in these developmental theories, I mean, it’s a whole universe of understanding, it’s really interesting, how much should you try to instill that knowledge and theory to your clients and how much should you find ways to talk about these things in a way that’s outside of the theory and the concepts? And I find that that’s a challenge — it’s a challenge for me because I’m so enamored by the theory and sometimes I just want to, like I’m doing it now, I’m bringing a lot of these theoretical components. So, how can we go about implementing some of this work without talking about getting all geeky around Ken Wilber and integral and stages and all these other authors that are fantastic?
Todd: Yeah, totally. I do very little of the theoretical and the philosophical in my coaching at this point. As little as serves the client is the way I look at it. The assessments take care of a lot of that. My explanation of adult development theory at this point is, “Hey, it seems like, according to research over a lot a period of years, it seems like there might be stages of adult development and that the stage that we’re operating from could have a huge impact on our leadership, on our partnership at home, our parenting, and a variety of other things, in addition to the way we manage complexity and change and strategy and relationships at work, like maybe. So if you’re curious, like we can assess that in addition to personality, in addition to getting a 360 so how others are experiencing you, and let’s just take that data and hold it lightly and explore it together.” And so that’s about as theoretical as I get at the beginning of an engagement. And that assessment work really ends up doing a lot. It really raises awareness. It helps people be way more curious and then they might lead us down a thread of wondering about some of the philosophical underpinnings. So I really like the partnership approach to that and the let their curiosity help to lead the way and I’m just there to walk with them in that.
Alex: You mentioned assessment a couple of times so I want to explore that, with the caveat that I think we’re at a really exciting point in just the growth of the coaching profession, where I think more coaches are getting exposed to assessment. Traditionally, a lot of coaches were psychologists, so the assessment component was ingrained. A lot of the coaching vendors, the traditional firms, they always had a strong assessment component. I learned that right at CCL, the Center for Creative Leadership. So, assessment was always a part of thinking about coaching. But a lot of coaches that run their own practice that went through coach certification programs but don’t necessarily have a psychological training background don’t use as much assessment. Let’s also caveat that, to use assessments, you need to have an understanding of the assessment. Some assessments do require you to have more of a psychological background, but there’s a lot of assessments that you can use with clients that you can get certified in the assessment, learn a lot about how to use it with clients, and then go in and leverage them. So, with that caveat, I’m excited about I think the inclusion of assessments in coaching more broadly across different diverse populations of coaches with different backgrounds. So, that being said, tell us about how you use assessments and, especially, since we’re talking about adult development and stage conceptions today, let’s think about how you use the assessment in the context of that work.
Todd: Sure, yeah, and that also opens up a door to structure of a typical engagement too in some of these other pieces that hold this developmental journey.
Alex: And, Todd, that is so interesting. Yeah, so, traditionally, I think you see assessments at the upfront but I’ve started to hear more about other coaches using assessments across the coaching engagement. So if you have some insight in that, that will also be powerful.
Todd: Yeah. And I arrived at this given what’s happened in the pandemic and just so much coaching going to virtual and I think greater isolation for coaches, I’ve doubled down on community, like I’m realizing, especially at the stage I’m at too, like if you don’t have a community of peers, you start to shrivel a little bit. It almost feels like death when you don’t have that partnership and those sparks that come from those conversations. So my approach, year to year, is constantly evolving so the assessment battery that I’m using now in addition to the structure is different than just a year ago, which is different than the year before that, and that comes from being in this community of coaches in this question of what will serve clients and who and under what circumstances and what’s out there nowadays. And so I’ve arrived at — I’m certified in a few 360s. I still like, for one-on-one coaching especially, some kind of 360 close to the front of the engagement so how are people experiencing you in the workplace feels really important to me. I used to do that interview style, which I know a lot of coaches do. I now use a 360 tool, because I like the breakdown of different — you can group peers and other group and you can break down other state direct reports, boss, boss’s boss, I like that breakdown across a set of competencies. I think that kind of nuance can give people a really good grounding and how different groups are. So often will a boss experience someone way differently than their direct reports and their peers and this other stakeholder group and so I think that’s a really good information and invites rich exploration and conversation so I like that closer up front. I like try party or quad party meetings with the boss to get alignment on what we start to outline as goals from that initial assessment work. And then I also like, as soon as possible, for someone to start to assemble a group that’s going to give them feedback throughout and sometimes to allow that group to shift too. I used to get caught sometimes early in my career in having these amazing experiences one on one with somebody, it felt like we were changing the whole world and others weren’t really experiencing what we were experiencing in the coaching so I’ve designed quite a bit to be able to really have it be what are people actually experiencing from these conversations that we’re having and what you’re bringing out so to assemble that group and to have feedback happen more often throughout, so like quick check-ins with more people as it serves that person and those folks I think is really important to design in with somebody. And so we get that alignment at the beginning, we’ve designed this approach, we have those other folks giving feedback. And then usually it may be month 2, sometimes 3 of a six-month engagement, I’ll do a combined personality and adult stage assessment. I love the one I’m doing right now through this company called Aephoria out of South Africa, out of Cape Town, I really like that they brought the Enneagram in for personality. They’re big on it and I found that that, the Enneagram invites a conversation about what formed someone in really interesting ways. I just liked that idea of like let’s get to your story and get to how you may have formed in this way and what your environment was like. And that seems to open things up and shine a light on like, “Oh, the way that my parents were and the way my family dynamic was, like that’s actually — that was on the 360 that we just did, that’s still coming through, that pattern, like that’s crazy, I’d love to actually work on that,” and so I like the Enneagram complement to the adult stage because it gives — like people at different personality types at the same stage can look really different. There’s going to be some common threads where they can look really different. And then also personality without the stage interpretation, I think, can be a little bit limited. So I like the combination of the two. And then when you put those three together, 360, personality, and stage, I think within that first three months of a one-to-one engagement, like that person is already starting to change because of the quality of the feedback that they’ve gotten from those assessments.
Alex: Cool. Yeah, well, let’s do unpack there. Yeah, the Enneagram is an interesting tool.
Todd: I was out on it. I was not in, I was like, “Oh, this is just spiritual weird thing over here,” but then I experienced an organization that seemed to really be using it well and complementing the adult stage work with it so I’m much more in, but I try to hold all these things a lot more lightly than I used to.
Alex: So, do you follow a typical structure for your engagements or do you vary that based on either the organizational need or the individual?
Todd: Yeah, both. I have a general, I think which is pretty standard for coaches, of a one-to-one engagement is often per what clients are used to at this point, six months with some type of assessment battery with tri-party meetings with the boss or quad with HR, a coaching conversation every two weeks, but I also do spot coaching and conversations and communication in between. I found that to be really important for a lot of people. So that’s my base one on one, but it often gets extended. I’m usually working with someone for a year or more one to one. And then I also do a good amount of team and group work at this point, which feels like the next — even though there’s a lot of going on, that feels like a next frontier for coaching of integrating the one to one but, ultimately, we’re trying to help people build learning and development community with these groups at work and also evolve cultures through group work and then also help people be the best teammate or leader of a team that they can be so to actually do the teamwork as well. And those vary a lot more widely, structure, team structure, group is a lot more client specific and need specific than starting off with a one on one and seeing what happens from there.
Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, team coaching is definitely the next frontier. We run the GTCI, the Global Team Coaching Institute program, and coaches really love just going from, “Okay, I’m a great one on one coach, like how do I become a great team coach?” and it’s not an easy transition —
Todd: Not easy.
Alex: — working with teams is complex and applying some of the same things that work one on one doesn’t necessarily work. So, yeah, that’s been, I think, a powerful learning for us running those programs and seeing what coaches get out of that. And just organizations too, it’s a very cost effective way to scale coaching as well because you’re getting people exposed to the coaching process, to the development process, and, again, in a much more cost effective way. And I like your idea of how to weave in the individual work that’s happening with the team or group level work is really interesting. I want to zero in on another observation you had and it’s just the importance of a community of practice when it comes to being a coach, right? Sometimes being a coach, especially in these pandemic, post-pandemic years where everyone’s working virtually, just connecting with other people, especially in your profession that are going through some of the same challenges, is very powerful. So, what do you do to connect with other coaches? And since we’ve been talking about stages, it’s like are you part of any communities where coaches are talking about these stage conceptions and how those apply to their work?
Todd: I am. Yeah, thanks for asking. If we talk about nothing else in this call, I personally think this is the most important thing for me and I found it to be really important for coaches. I was under this illusion, again, my ego stage early on in my career, okay, I want to change the world for the better, I want to help evolve these organizations and help people make these shifts that I’m seeing at these retreats. Like I’d go to a contemplative retreat and see someone make what felt like a really big shift in a weekend and I’m like why aren’t organizations employing some of these kinds of tools? And so I wanted to change the world for the better and felt like I as a one-to-one coach, if I’m working at a high enough level at big organizations and then scaling that down, I alone can make a huge impact. And I have found that how high a level, how many people, that feels like a complete falsehood actually. It doesn’t feel true to me at all anymore. And because I am so limited in what I bring when I’m operating as a solo-preneur and in my own mind and just one on one or in small groups with my own clients, I’m discovering how limited that is. It feels insanely limited when it comes to change and in meeting the forces that we’re experiencing right now in the world and negative impacts on people. And so I prioritize it. How do you do it? Make it your number one priority. So right now, my number one priority is community creation in my personal life and also in my coaching life. And I made that commitment maybe a year, year and a half ago in the middle of pandemic when I’m like, wow, I’m living the dream that I put out there five years ago in the organization and business that I’m running but, wow, do I not feel fulfilled, and, wow, do I feel really lonely. And I feel like I’m not learning enough from bumping into other people, some of them certainly brilliant, and so it’s my number one priority. I love the adult stage stuff and I think it might serve people in organizations so I’m a part of a couple different groups that are centered around that. Aephoria, if you do their training and their certifications and you get into a group that has an every-two-week discussion. I’m also in the Growth Edge Network, which is Garvey Burger’s organization. She wrote Changing on the Job, another big person in the adult development theory world and so I’m in that organization as well. And then I’m in a couple of other smaller coaching groups, informal groups, and so that group, not only is it good for business, like business partnerships, subcontractors going in both directions, but also the conversation and the learning and the joy and the connection that comes with it all really is sustaining for someone that does a lot of their coaching from home.
Alex: Yeah, absolutely. So thinking about where the world is today, what do you see as like the role of coaching in helping enable that and sustain, let’s say, development of more conscious approaches? So the evolution of consciousness, the emergence of more mindful approaches, of organizations being more systemically oriented, understanding its impact to the societies they serve, to the communities that they sustain, but also the environmental impact. So, running a business today is more complex than it’s ever been, right? There’s all these different stakeholders. So, what do you see as the role of coaching in being able to enable individuals and, ultimately, organizations to be more in tune with some of the needs of the modern world or postmodern world or however you want to define it?
Todd: Yeah, I certainly could be biased here but I’m probably talking to a biased crowd when it comes to coaching. I feel that coaching is and has become an invaluable catalyst for development, evolution, growth, means needing, equity, and different things that that can mean and inclusion on a variety of levels because it’s an intervention. People come in and help people get curious about their development and how they’re impacting others and where the organization is going and so it feels invaluable to me. I think one of the things that can really help accelerate that beyond that stage view, which, again, we’ll hold that lightly as something that can support that, is the idea of a combination of organization development, consulting, coaches that are aligned, because often it’s disparate coaches working one on one with people in an organization, I feel like can help or can be a starter or can further things but I feel like that’ll only take things so far. I feel like that coordinated effort of development where there’s alignment internally with folks and then there’s alignment with the team of people that’s supporting you from the outside and then there’s also a continued experimentation with people development models and culture development models so there’s your general approach of what’s happening in alignment there, inside, outside, and then there’s continued experimentation, what I call — there’s an organization run by Saul Kaplan where they call it the Business Model Sandbox, like you’re constantly innovating and trying new things in your business model and then scaling what seems to work. I think the same with the people development model, like have a people development model sandbox in your organization and a culture development sandbox where you’re constantly experimenting and then scaling what seems to work. And so I feel like that is a way bigger accelerator than an organization having 100 disparate one-to-one coaches working in their little silos versus that — one-on-one coaching can be really helpful but I think that kind of coordination is even more important at this point.
Alex: So how much of your work is working with the talent management, OD folks in an organization versus just being a coach in an individual engagement?
Todd: Yeah, because I run my own practice, I’m not currently doing any subcontracting so I get to be direct to head of talent development at an organization or the CEO or the leader that’s bringing me in and so I’m more privy to that than I used to be where I was a coach being brought in and having some context around what’s going on but not really in most instances. Then I get to bring other partners and really work backwards from their needs, their vision, where they’re trying to go, maybe interjecting with, “Okay, if you wanna go there, have you thought about this, this, and this?” and then once we have a better sense in that alignment together, I can start to say, “Hey, I think this person or this organization might be helpful to support what we’re doing here,” and so that’s been a big change in my business in the last few years is doing as much of that as serves the organization.
Alex: I mean, absolutely interesting shift from working on the larger umbrella of another company to actually having the relationship yourself.
Todd: But that’s hard work, like to be able to just get to that person and to have meaningful conversations with them over time is one of the hardest things that I found in this business. I didn’t have sales experience before I started doing this so I really just went all in on developing myself as a coach and trying to get as many reps as possible, subcontracting a lot, just to be doing a lot of leadership coaching and learning and training in that way. And then I realized like I want to have this bigger impact and have deeper relationships and do the kind of work I was just outlining and said, “Well, I think I actually need to get to know some of these people, how the heck do I find them?” and so then I leaned on other coaches and a lot of other folks to get that kind of insight and I’m very much on that sales and development learning journey.
Alex: I think it’s one of the challenges of being a coach is that you join the coaching industry profession journey because you’re interested in working with other people and helping them develop, but then you end up just signing up to be an entrepreneur and to grow your business and focus on that. And it is one of the areas that I think where technology and coaching and some of the emerging digital coaching platforms and the incumbents, I know you used to work for, or maybe you still work with LHH, I used to be at CCL, so you go to these groups that do the business development and package coaching and really make it easier for coaches to go and just do their thing. So I think, traditionally, coaches have a couple different coaching companies they work with and then they have their own practice. Some coaches just do their own practice; some others just do subcontracting. But it’s just one of those things that coaches don’t necessarily know what they’re getting into when they decide they want to be coaches, like you don’t know that most of your time is going to be spent in business development. So, yeah, that’s a good observation. And it’s challenging, right? Like I was talking to Ray Dalio as part of our WBEC Summit in the green room before we went live, he was telling me that coaching that was really cool and congratulated me on being an entrepreneur, which, by the way, was amazing because Ray Dalio is like — it’s Ray Dalio. I mean, he’s just an iconoclast, right? I love his work, it’s just amazing. But what I told Ray is like, “Well, Ray, I never thought about you as an entrepreneur until I read your book and then I realized like, well, you’re one of the best investors ever, you run the largest hedge fund in the world but I think of you as a macro investor, I don’t think about you as an entrepreneur,” but when you think about what he did, it was just he built that Bridgewater from nothing. He’s an entrepreneur as much as he is the chief investment officer. I think that applies to coaches a lot and I see it, I talk to coaches all the time and one of the biggest challenges is just the business development. So being a coach is very complex. You have to have all these understanding of these models for development. You have to be good with people. You have to get results and also be liked by your clients, which at are odds sometimes because sometimes people don’t want to stretch and grow. So how do you do that? How do you become the person that helps them stretch but also you’re liked and you can sell more business? I mean, being a coach is incredibly difficult but the world needs it so bad. It’s such an exciting phase for the world and coaching as a whole.
Todd: Yeah, so exciting and so challenging and that multifaceted — and then there’s that other facet, which is being an operator, like actually running the operation of your organization, so those three buckets of sales, business development, marketing, actually being a coach and being really good at development and also that relationship element of that, which can you really be direct and challenging with someone and have that relationship, everything that comes with that coaching and development piece and then the operations side, very rarely can one person do all three of those really well and so that’s, for me, that middle ground of “I’m only a subcontractor” or “I’m only running my own thing,” like, for me, the middle way has been partnerships so just joint ventures and partnership, for the learning of it, for filling the needs, for getting help on, “Hey, who do you use for this?” or, “How can I be better at the operations or process part? What do you do for process?” So, again, that community piece has been huge and the informal partnership and venture part has been big for me.
Alex: I mean, a good portion of the coaching work that gets done in the world is done by boutique coaching firms and I think the boutique coaching firm model is you taught these other five coaches that have common interests and then you decide to go in a venture together and maybe form a partnership and then you go and sell coaching under the umbrella of that. I think a lot of very large organizations have started like that, right?
Todd: Yes.
Alex: And, I mean, the boutique coaching firm, I think they’re a little bit under fire with like the acceleration of the consolidation in the coaching industry, where you have like larger groups and a lot of money flowing in, but that’s I think a beautiful aspect of the coaching profession is those smaller groups of coaches that can really meet an enterprise where they are in terms of like what are you looking for when you’re developing your leaders, and some of those smaller companies hold the secret to being able to provide the coaching that’s needed for a subset of the employee population. That’s one of the things that I don’t want it to get lost as we’re scaling the coaching profession, so the role of the boutique coaching firm, I think, is just incredibly powerful. And as you’re talking about how you run your business and how you like to build community with other coaches, that reminded me of just like that’s a model that’s worked for entrepreneurs where they — and also helps you operationally, it helps you, you’re not alone, you’re doing it with other people, and, oftentimes, one of the partners, because well, the operator, the other one’s developing models so it’s a beautiful thing, right?
Todd: Absolutely. And it’s a moment that I’m at too is I’m becoming more of an entrepreneur in this work and now I’m in that existential question of how much of an entrepreneur and business leader do I want to be of a coaching operation? So, yeah, very much in that.
Alex: Absolutely. So, Todd, one of the things that I am fascinated about when it comes to just development in general is this idea of the Omega point, like development is headed towards almost like a climax but it’s a never-ending climax of development and existence, but there’s not a lot of conversation around like those higher — in coaching communities and maybe there’s a reason for that, but around these higher levels of development. At some point, they start becoming more transcendent and spiritual. And while we don’t really spend too much time with our clients talking specifically about spirituality, how do you embed that understanding of these higher bands of development into your work? Is it through meditation and suggesting maybe meditation to clients? Does it never come about? Like how do you embed some of these spiritual understanding that comes with being curious about stage development into the work that you do as a coach?
Todd: Sure. Yeah, I mean, the number one thing for me is assessing the stage and then understanding where that person is and what will stretch them. So, sometimes, I’m not worried at all, depending on where someone is, about those later stages. It’s all about really helping them move from where they are and connect that to what the organization needs them to do, what a 360 is saying. So it’s just all about that alignment and connection and really getting specific on a couple of things that will move them. Most leaders are at the last two conventional stages in my framework, what we call specializing, like very skill-centric leaders, which are can be really effective in certain organizations and just that part of them, in general, no matter what stage they’re at, is always going to be something you lean on is that idea of skill expertise. So a lot of leaders there. And then a lot of leaders at that next stage which is performing in the model that I’m using, which is a little more results, outcome oriented, can be profit oriented, the emotional intelligence, emotional life opens up more in that stage. And so I work a lot in moving people from specializing and performing and then a really tough move from performing to internalizing that first post-conventional stage and that’s really where, from whatever kind of top down management of life that might have come from culture and upbringing and some level of defense or safety orientation, starts to be more inwardly, life to be more inwardly generated, we get a little bit into what might be really challenging for somebody or letting go of control is really common in that space so I spend a lot of time in those spaces. And meditation can help in that realm especially, like to help really steady someone for that work and do the inner explorations. One of the beautiful things, Alex, I rarely have to suggest meditation to someone, like it’s already an area that they talk about in the assessment results for someone at that stage for moving them on so they see it there and then they often say to me in the debrief, like, “Oh, I do some meditation,” or, “I’ve always wanted to and I’m curious about it, can we talk about that?” and so I rarely have to go, “You really seem like you could be meditating. Have you thought about that?” Like I never have to do that.
Alex: Meditation is in the up and up. It’s really become like the topic of conversation at large.
Todd: Yeah. It’s so common now, people with Calm app and all that, and as you and I know, like that kind of meditation can only take you so far as far as the higher realms go. So, in my personal practice, I work with a meditation teacher every couple of months and he presented to me a Tibetan Buddhist map of consciousness which goes a heck of a lot later than the adult development maps and with a lot more nuance at each stage and so I’m working through that personally. And I think with the very occasional person that is pushing a later stage in a larger organization in their leadership, that work sometimes will incorporate meditation but certainly doesn’t have to, like just that ability to perspective take, to stretch vision, to stretch timelines, to see and feel, to actually not just see and think a system but actually feel a system and its different components and layers and other systems more deeply, like that’s often the conversations that we’re having with someone that’s later. And then for someone that’s at an earlier stage, I hope it comes through with my presence and with my approach and my adaptability as a coach, like that’s we’re ideally some of that transference can come.
Alex: Well, at the end of the day, that’s kind of what you were talking about where you were shocked when you were younger and you did that assessment, and then you thought you were like super post conventional and then it turned out you weren’t what you thought you were. A lot of it is really not just cognitive understanding, but it’s really about how you embody it and how you meet people where they are and that ability to just show up and be present. You can be present and not be at a higher stage of development, but the higher you go into those stages, the more you have to bring it to reality. And reading and being interested about it doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’re going to be at a certain level, which is fascinating. So, as you were talking about those stages of meditation, I remember that I’ve been wanting to read this book that I have somewhere in my — I was going to say bookshelf but now I have all my books there and just in the floor because my bookshelf didn’t make it through in the move here to this place. Pointing Out the Great Way: The Stages of Meditation in the Mahamudra Tradition by —
Todd: Dr. Dan Brown?
Alex: Yeah, Dan Brown. So I’ve been wanting to read that book for years so I’m going to have, at some point, maybe next summer, to schedule like a two-week vacation, which I haven’t taken a two-week vacation in 10 years, so I should probably plan that and take that book and read it like — have you read that book?
Todd: We didn’t plan this, by the way, audience.
Alex: Yeah, no.
Todd: He’s my former teacher.
Alex: Oh, no way. That’s crazy.
Todd: And so I worked with Dan and I worked with the person who apprenticed under him named Dr. John Churchill and so, yeah, they’re the ones who have taken me through that.
Alex: That’s amazing. Well, no one better to take you through that than Dan Brown.
Todd: The best. And the other thing about Dan is he’s a doctors at Harvard Psych and he’s also one of the leading attachment, ex-adult attachment healing experts in the world, or was, like God rest, he recently passed, and so I’ve done the whole attachment series with him too, which is kind of like this complementary piece — it’s the integral of it, when you’re moving up through stages, it’s never just one, like, “Okay, I wanna move up to this stage, I’m going to see a psychologist or I’m gonna work with a coach or I’m gonna just meditate,” like I’ve found just there’s this whole wheel of developmental approaches and so the attachment work — actually did an adult attachment assessment and then work, the protocol to work with whatever was off with that, with Dan, which was amazing.
Alex: Did Dan just pass, you said?
Todd: Yeah, Dan just passed.
Alex: Oh, I’m sorry to hear that. I didn’t know that.
Todd: A few months back, yeah, was really sad. He’s a genius that very few people like have ever heard of, like he is a leader in the psychological field and then a leader in meditation world like few understand and so, yeah, it’s a big loss, but he —
Alex: I’m sorry to hear about that, yeah. His work is fantastic, I’ve been exposed to it, but I’m going to make the case of reading that book. It’s really fascinating.
Todd: Yeah.
Alex: So to close out our podcast, we’re talking about stages, and as you’re going through stages, whether it’s individual or collectively as society, there’s some rocky pathways, like development is thorny and as you’re going from one stage of development to the next, it’s a turbulent time and we’re seeing it in society today, we’re talking about this elevated understanding and consciousness at large. It’s manifesting itself in some ways and the deeper consciousness is rising in the world, but at the same time, we’re seeing a lot of turbulence. So, anything that, as you’re working with individuals and you see people struggling to go through those motions of going through the spiral of development, any observations, any recommendations for coaches, as you see that struggle of when you’re being pulled and entering like a new dimension of understanding or a new stage of development?
Todd: Yeah, great question. There’s a mantra that I live by which is nobody does anything alone and you can have all the support that you need and that’s empowering for me and I think for some of my clients, especially if you’re moving from performing into internalizing, like that can be a really painful, really challenging move because whatever certainty you are acting with before, everything starts to turn more into a question for a lot of people in making that move. That can be really anxiety provoking. And we often think like, okay, anxiety is rising, bad, but anxiety can actually be a marker of a really important stage move that you’re making so someone that’s aware of this construct can be helpful, working with a coach, you can work just purely with a maturity coach or a stage coach, therapy can be often a really good complement and depending on the type, people are loving internal family systems therapy but there’s a variety, somatic therapy, like there’s a variety of therapies that can fit what you’re experiencing and where you are and the stage you’re at. Meditation teachers, certainly, of different types. So I just encourage people to be explorers of this stuff, like get to know yourself and try different things. I’ve done all varieties of retreat work that has helped me at different points in my life. And so try different things and if you’re really interested in developing, build a community of people that are also interested in that and are trying different things and you’ll just learn so much and evolve so much faster and you’ll do it together. It won’t be this experience you’re doing by yourself, it’d be an experience among peers and in community and I think that is so much more powerful than individuals going forward, like what will really help I think cultures move through stages together or nations or ultimately this entire world to move up through stages of evolution over the next 100, whatever it is, few thousand years, like that idea of together I think really speeds things up and also brings more integrity and more checks and balances to it. So that’s my prayer and my hope is that more and more of that happens.
Alex: Yeah. I hope, especially in an age of acceleration, when things happen so quickly, and it takes a long time to go through stages but then there’s this time compression that happens as things move faster so it puts a lot of pressure on individuals and people, organizations. So thank you for the work that you do and for being with us today. I enjoyed the conversation. Thank you, Todd.
Todd: I really appreciate it, Alex. Thanks so much.
Alex: Thank you.