Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee
Shonna Waters

(interview blurb)

Shonna: The world is kind of open and the big thing is like let’s ask the right questions and do that through like a scientific method and try to learn from it and work in partnership with technologists rather than sort of letting that take us in a dangerous space.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is an organizational psychologist, technologist, and leadership coach. She’s the author of The Practical Guide to HR Analytics and co-author of The Coaching Shift: How a Coaching Mindset and Skills Can Change You, Your Interactions, and the World Around You. She’s also an executive at BetterUp. Please welcome Shonna Waters.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Shonna.

Shonna: Hi, Alex. Good to see you.

Alex: It’s so good to see you. I’m so excited to have you on the podcast.

Shonna: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you. I’ve been watching and listening and excited to be one of the guests or participants of it.

Alex: You and I always have fun when we talk so now we get to do it sharing a drink, a hot drink remotely so it’s nice. So, let’s start where we typically start Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today?

Shonna: Well, we took a little turn from where I was going to go and I am drinking a hot tea, Masala Chai, so this one was a gift from a neighbor, very kind, so I thought that would be a nice place to start with friends.

Alex: It’s a great place to start. I’m doing a peppermint tea.

Shonna: Is that a typical tea choice for you?

Alex: Yeah, yeah, peppermint is one of my go-to. I had hibiscus earlier and I’m doing this fast thing where I can’t have what you want and just to have Poppi, the healthy kind of soda kind of thing, it looked amazing, I was going to go buy it at Whole Foods but, hey, I’m doing this thing this week in preparation for the summer so I’m experimenting,

Shonna: I was going to ask you, like what outcomes are you trying to achieve with your fast?

Alex: You know, it’s called Prolon, one of my friends swears by it and loves it. I never do kind of strange diet things, like I naturally fast sometimes when I’m not hungry and eat pretty healthy regularly but I thought, hey, I’ll try it, so it’s like this scientifically proven, it’s more like a diet than a fast but the way the meals are structured is very low caloric intake and it mimics the fasting in your body so it’s like a five-day thing where you’re eating couple soups and olives and like just random, weird kind of things throughout the day and you can have as much tea as you want and, apparently, it’s amazing. I’m on day two, I’m feeling great. I’ll let you know when I see you in New York next week if it worked or not.

Shonna: Well, if you don’t show up in New York next week then I will know not to follow in your footsteps.

Alex: Yes, no, he didn’t make it through the five-day fast mimicking diet so cross that from my list.

Shonna: I never saw Alex again, yeah. 

Alex: No, I hope that’s not the case but I guess we’ll find out soon enough but I’m really excited to have you on the podcast today because you’ve had such an amazing career and you’re one of my favorite IO psychologists so it’s nice to have you here. So, let’s start by kind of going back to the beginning of your career. How did you decide to become an IO psychologist?

Shonna: Yeah. Well, I’m glad that’s the defined point that we’re starting at because I’m like I think I started my career when I was 13 and bridge caddy and things like that but we’ll go with the IO part. So it was funny, I’ve always been interested in a lot of different things and had changed my major many times —

Alex: I’m shocked.

Shonna: — in college. That will emerge as a pattern. And my dad was like, “Alright, Shonna, you gotta figure this thing out.” So he was encouraging me to try out jobs that I thought I was interested in so I was actually working at a subdivision of NIH, the National Institute of Drug Abuse Research, NIDA, and I was in a molecular neurobiology lab doing research on animal models of addiction and that was what I really thought I wanted to do, molecular genetics, at the time and things like that, but it was for free so I was volunteering and so to pay the bills on the side, I was working at Starbucks as a barista and a shift supervisor and had this weird realization one day that I was more excited to go to work at Starbucks than I was to the lab, which was weird because I was really interested in the research itself and the results of it or whatever but the day to day of like I was alone all the time, I was putting mice in boxes and doing PCR and things like that so I really started to reflect on what it was and it was all the people stuff, like Starbucks had a very mature HR system, a lot of IO embedded in how they trained and developed and promoted and I was interacting with people every day and getting to know them and thought like, man, wouldn’t it be great if I could combine the psychology and the research with all of this business stuff? And so, I’m on the internet doing all these searches, found IO psychology, thought that I had just discovered a new planet or something like that, go to tell my dad about this story and he was like, “Shonna, you’ve gotta be kidding me. I’ve been doing that my entire career.” He was a psychometrician by training but had been in military research and organizational settings ever since he had gotten out of the military, so I didn’t understand that program manager meant that, I thought it was something with computers, he was on a computer all day. So, anyways, I ended up being lucky enough to get some applied experience while I was still an undergrad and fell in love.

Alex: That’s amazing. I love that you didn’t even know your dad was doing that all along.

Shonna: No, despite like I spent — I mean, for anyone who’s familiar with HumRRO as a company, I literally grew up in the hallways of HumRRO building paper airplanes and control towers with IO PhDs and had no idea.

Alex: It’s amazing. So, what was your focus in grad school? What did you do your dissertation on?

Shonna: So my dissertation was on tradeoffs —

Alex: The deep breath.

Shonna: I know.

Alex: I love just like every time someone brings someone else’s dissertation where it’s been like in the past 20 years or so, people, the deep breath.

Shonna: Yeah. Well, it’s funny because I love that you and I have a shared close friend Brodie Riordan, my co-author and co-instructor at Georgetown, who, hers, it’s managerial coaching, it’s great, easy, it sounds relatable. Mine was on tradeoffs in validity and adverse impact in using general intelligence or specific ability measures so it was not quite as relatable but very interesting and the grand story there is that I’ve always been interested in applied problems so lots of research, things like intelligence are very predictive of all kinds of life outcomes, including job performance, but we know that they also result in subgroup differences, which is much less than ideal if you also care about diversity and creativity and all of that. So that’s what I studied. I was really interested in fairness and bias at work and, ultimately, how we create better places to work but also happier employees.

Alex: Very practical. I love it. 

Shonna: Yeah. 

Alex: Do you remember the first time you heard about this thing called coaching?

Shonna: I do. So, my colleague in grad school, John Mears, he was working with David Peterson. John had come from PDI, I believe, and started working with David on research during grad school and he was studying coaching. And, literally, I remember saying the squishy stuff, like you can’t actually measure it, this is kind of like the black magic or whatever so I was not the immediate adopter. I was aware of it, aware of David’s work and sort of some of the counseling and scientific backing of it early on but I did not become quite the devotee that I am now until much later in my career.

Alex: Yeah, let’s fast forward to that and then we’ll explore other areas of your career, but most of our listeners are coaches and I’ve always find it fascinating people’s journey into coaching, because we’re still at those early stages of the profession and the industry where to find it, especially people in our generation, to find that you’ve had to have an interesting turn of events to kind of be like, “Hmm, coaching is kind of where I wanna spend my life’s energy and focus.” 

Shonna: Yeah, for sure. I mean, for me, as I was alluding to, I really spent the first half of my career very focused on the measurement side of things so I joke I was turning people into numbers before I spent a lot of time talking to them. But I had done really broad range consulting for the first 12 years at HumRRO and PDRI. And during that time, I did some organizational development work and organizational effectiveness work and I had debriefed 360s with senior executives and so I was dabbling in adjacent areas but it wasn’t until I took an internal role, first building selection systems for a midsize government agency and then shifting over into the OD/OE side of that work that I really realized that even measurement work is change management work and, at the end of the day, I had this really robust skill set around individual measurement and organizational intervention but really was lacking at individual intervention, like IOs generally are not trained really well to intervene at an individual level, we tend to study people in the aggregate. And so I was doing some OD work and kept finding that like so often it came back to the leader and was then in this position where like, okay, now I as consultant have to go in and help this leader change and felt really ill equipped. I was also going through some personal change, like work-life balance stuff in my own life, and I was lucky enough to have two really great mentors at the agency who had gone through Georgetown’s coaching program and advocated for me to go through it too. They thought it would be both helpful for me and my personal journey but also as a professional. So I went through that and, like as it is for many coaches, it was life changing, really sort of intoxicated by how life changing and transformational coaching can be. But as an IO psychologist, as a multisystems person and someone who dispositionally is not that patient, I was like, okay, but how do we scale this? How do we get it to more people? How do we make it so that when we’re coaching this individual and they’re changing so much but the company’s not or their situation isn’t, how do we affect that too? And that’s sort of what led me to looking at the intersection of technology.

Alex: Love that frame. And before we get to the intersection of technology, which I think is going to be a really fun part of the conversation, you had also a number of years where you worked at SHRM. 

Shonna: Yeah.

Alex: And so what were you doing there? Because I think that was the step in your career kind of headed to BetterUp, right?

Shonna: It was, yeah. So it was really interesting. I went through coach training, started coaching people, joined the coaching community of practice at the agency I was in, was using it in more of my day-to-day work, even through the lens of like HR systems design at the agency and I was engaged in a lot of enterprise-level transformation efforts, but what I kept finding was that the business or the mission, in the case of an agency, they were never the barriers to change, they generally got on board or whatever, but I experienced a lot of friction with my HR colleagues and some of it was around not having sort of a coaching mindset, some of it was around not having as much analytic or data fluency, and so I decided that that was the problems that I wanted to be in and so an opportunity became available to lead the research department at SHRM so I took a VP of Research role at SHRM to help them shift the kind of research they were doing from more survey, just sort of reporting, strict reporting out to a more scientifically oriented research agenda.

Alex: Really cool. And then you aligned with your vision and mission of scaling coaching. So how was the journey coming into BetterUp? I think you started there around 2017, is that accurate?

Shonna: Yeah, so I came in right after our Series B round of funding so it’s about 50 employees at that time and I think officially on the same day that I started, Levi Nieminen also started, so he was another IO but we were really the first IO psychologists at BetterUp and we were in these very hybrid roles where portion of our portfolio was driving and leading research projects, a portion of it was supporting marketing and building out content and things like that, also supporting our customers directly, both as they’re considering purchasing the solution but also once they’re customers and helping them understand the data and the insights that they were getting.

Alex: Such an interesting time for coaching technology. We’re coming on to approaching like the 10th year of what I kind of ascribe as to the emergence of coaching and technology or tech-enabled coaching. I started CoachLogix that became Coaching.com in 2012. So back then, there was really nothing in terms of technology in coaching. It was essentially spreadsheets were probably better than the systems and platforms that we were using in coaching back then. But then in the mid-2010s, the tech-enabled coaching model started and I credit BetterUp with being the first company that really scaled up tech-enabled coaching, which, for me, what that means is really at the core and attention and focus on the coachee experience as part of coaching, which before just the experience of the coachee was not something that was considered, and when you add that layer of technology there, then it really opens up the pathway for rethinking the way coaching services are delivered, managed, marketed. The other thing that I would credit BetterUp with is really raising the global awareness of coaching, not to the coach population that was already ascribing that coaching was the best thing in the world, but at the organizational level, at the individual level, where I think that millennials and Gen Z are very development oriented, and I don’t love generalizing terms of generations but some things are applicable. They’re very development oriented, so the idea that you could have a coach and, hierarchically, something that was meant for the top now can be accessed by everyone, I think that caught on fire and that’s kind of where we are almost 10 years later, the landscape of coaching has really changed and it’s difficult to think about coaching without technology. So, would love to hear some of your high level thoughts before we get into some of the specific areas that we can tackle on coaching and tech, which is so exciting.

Shonna: Yeah, it’s so true and there’s so many aspects of it, like I can even remember when I went through coach training and we were having to do our pro bono coaching and all of this, I didn’t think I would like coaching virtually. I get so much energy from being with people and it gets much data from being with people that I really didn’t think I would take to coaching on a phone or coaching via a video platform. So, this idea that that’s happening at scale and everything and breaking down boundaries, which by the way, I did actually really like it. It gave me access to a whole different kind of set of data.

Alex: You’re right. People were like is coaching as effective over the phone and video as it is in person? Now, it sounds ridiculous, almost preposterous because we’re just so used to living our lives in front of the computer, but 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was actually a quandary, wasn’t it?

Shonna: Yeah. And yet, I still, like earlier this week, yesterday, I was having a conversation with an HR leader who was saying they just don’t believe you can build connection virtually as much so they’re pivoting back towards in-person work arrangements and things so I think we’re probably not done with totally the swings and perspectives on these things but, yeah, I mean, what really drew me to the use of technology in coaching was the data, it was kind of the scientific aspect of it. So, there’s two things for me that felt like blockers and this really did date back to my skepticism in grad school. So, the first was that, inherently, by it being a confidential one-on-one conversation, it makes it hard to study, right? And if we can’t study it, it makes it really hard to know how do we know if it’s good? How do we know if it’s working? How do I as a coach get better? There’s a lot of celebrity coaches, how do we know that they’re really the best versus they’re the most well-known? There’s so much of just like a cloud of mystique over that. But the second thing is for a company to make an investment in coaching to a large population and if we think it helps people, that’s what we want, we have to be able to tie it to business goals and outcomes and things like that and if we don’t have visibility into, measuring what’s happening and what’s really changing as a result of it, we can’t make those connections. So when I learned about BetterUp, what was particularly appealing to me was that they had already been trying to build the scientific basis and they had measurement tools even before I started. Now, one of the first projects I took on within the first six weeks I think I was there was updating and redoing the development and validation of our measurement model, but that, by itself, to me, it was like, oh, that is going to be a massive unlock for our ability to really learn, advance the profession, make this connection and relevance to business leaders in a way that could get this thing that had been, in my experience, incredibly transformational to more people.

Alex: The capability that technology brings to be able to scale coaching is unprecedented, but it all seems to be coming at the right time where technology has alienated us in a way, not technology itself but our use of technology, and every time I’m in a restaurant and I see two people having a romantic dinner and they’re both on their phones, I’m like there’s so much great stuff that happens with progress and technology but that is just such a painful thing to see.

Shonna: I was going to say my three-year-old the other day told me that she wanted to go to a sushi restaurant because one time we went with the family and it was a nice sushi restaurant so we had brought her iPad. Turned out that’s like now her association is like I like sushi because I get to use my iPad.

Alex: Wow, that is funny, frightening, and kind of cute.

Shonna: Totally a mom win, right? 

Alex: Totally. I mean, I can’t believe you have like — you’ve done all the things you’ve done in your career and you have a husband and three kids and two dogs and, apparently, you lost your cat a couple months ago.

Shonna: I did. I lost my cat.

Alex:  I’m so sorry. 

Shonna: I know, Bacchus, he was actually — so I did my PhD in Minnesota, which you may be familiar with the Minnesota winters are not necessarily a great time and finding you outdoors, which had benefits for getting my dissertation done quickly but it also meant I was alone a lot in my apartment working on my dissertation, and so my now husband had gotten me this kitten while I was there working on it so I was like trauma bonded to this kitten for being trapped in a room alone for a year or whatever working on my dissertation. So we were very close. He was almost 17.

Alex: I’m so sorry. You never know, maybe it’ll come back. 

Shonna: I mean, they do have a lot of lives. 

Alex: We’ll see. You’ll have to keep me posted, if I see you next week and I don’t die from the prolonged fasting thing that I’m doing. So going back to the coaching and tech as we we’re talking about, it’s just the ability to scale coaching, it’s really powerful. It’s a new way of thinking about scaling that type of intervention. But at the same time, some people are not very comfortable with just the idea of scaling coaching. And you mentioned David Peterson. So David is one of those people that was excited about the potential of scaling coaching but also concerned about how you scale the unscalable. So what are some of your thoughts? And based on your experience all these years, what are some of the ways in which we can scale coaching in a way that it’s aligned with what we all love about the unscaled version of coaching?

Shonna: Yeah. I love that question and I can share some of some of my thoughts on that and perspective but, I mean, Alex, I think one of the reason why you and I always have so much fun is you’re the ultimate scholar on these topics so would love you to chime in, disagree, challenge me. We need a little debate. 

Alex: I love it. We always have very healthy debates. 

Shonna: We do, I think, but we can disagree about an issue, not with each other. 

Alex: Which is hard to find these days at large in society, I find. I feel like we take our positions so personally then when someone attacks a view, it’s almost like a personal attack and that’s one of the things I think we have to cure in our society as a whole to be able to have conversations and hold the space where we can actually think, well, maybe I’m not 100 percent right or maybe this person is offending me but it’s how I’m interpreting it and we have to process that together.

Shonna: I mean, that’s a huge part I think of what Brodie and I and so many others, we’re not alone in this, have so much conviction, like we as coaches have such an important role to play and helping to solve some of these societal problems is like we have to change the way we’re approaching our interactions and the way we view conflict to move past it. So Brodie and I refer to it as being a new kind of con artist, curious, open, and non-judgmental. It’s like none of us have privileged access to the truth, I can be curious about why you and I disagree and learn more. But, yeah, I mean, I think — so David, I think his cautionary message was commoditization, like how do you maintain quality and still get to the kind of scale and democratization that I think the optimistic view of what this can look like espouses, and my answer to that is nuance, really. I think that one of the things I’m most excited about with the maturation and expansion of digital coaching platforms and things like that is we now have standardized measures and data models and things like that to be able to amass more knowledge, we have more and more diverse populations, both of coaches and of coachees, and what that will eventually enable us to do is get a lot more precise about who needs what when. So, for example, there are a million different backgrounds that coaches have and a million different problems that a coachee comes to a conversation with. Well, what kind of background is needed for what type of problem set? Is it always coaching? We have all these adjacent one-to-one helping professions, like mentoring, specialist coaching, which is probably, it’s kind of a different thing than developmental process coaching, and we have peer coaching, we have managerial coaching, how do we help people figure out, even therapy, what’s the thing that is going to best help them in that moment? And there are times where that could be technology or that could be not a live conversation but an asynchronous conversation. It could be learning resources. And so I think there’s a lot of opportunity to say like if we step back from coaching, defined as we have thought of it and what it has looked like historically, and instead go problem first, what are we trying to do, what are we trying to solve, what are the things that have to be true and where is human connection absolutely critical and what type with what kind of expertise, I think that starts to open us up in really different ways. I think there’s even been some work on single session coaching and how impactful that can be. So, I think there’s just like the world is kind of open and the big thing is let’s ask the right questions and do that through a scientific method and try to learn from it and work in partnership with technologists rather than sort of letting that take us in a dangerous space.

Alex: So many things to unpack there. And I think one of the threads going across that answer is really around just what scale can do to a profession like coaching, just understanding all the sorts of things that people are working on and understanding how to match coaches and coachees, not just based in geography and time zone, for example, but also understand what kind of engagement design is needed and being able to eventually have some predictive analytics that will tell, “For this engagement, we recommend three sessions or 30 sessions.” I mean, we’re seeing it with the sudden explosion of AI models that are everywhere. It used to be something that geeks and VCs would get excited about. Now, the VCs are still excited about but now you have everyone excited about ChatGPT. I’m planning a vacation, right? I’ve been thinking how cool to the point where you can actually go and say, “Hey, ChatGPT, I’m looking to go to this place and this is how much I wanna spend and I’m interested in food,” and it just spits out a whole thing that is essentially your trip and it’s based on exactly what you were looking for. Bringing that back to coaching is, I think, with the amount of data and the data models that you have underpinning that volume and flow of coaching work, it really starts to open a new landscape and horizons for what coaching can do and how it should do it. It’s not only what it can do but also how we should go about doing it. I still think we’re in the early stages of being able to leverage that but the promise I think is substantial enough to underpin the value of a lot of the experiments that we are doing. My whole point with coaching and technology for the last many years has been we just need to treat it as we’re experiment. We can’t say we found the holy grail of how you scale coaching, it’s really, well, there’s this potential of combining technology and coaching and there’s all these things we’re going to be learning over the next five to ten years and that’s where I think some of the commercial models and the research models converge and maybe there’s not as much alignment as there could be but, overall, I think the rising tide is lifting all boats.

Shonna: Yeah, I totally agree with that. And I think we also — at the end of the day, AI is math and we trust math for all sorts of things. And so some of it, I just feel like there’s this aura of — I don’t know, like we sort of lose the essence of what’s really happening and what we’re exploring, what we’re experimenting with I think sometimes through the media stuff and noise, but it can be used for all sorts of things. It’s a great pattern recognition tool, right? So even think about my own coaching sessions. By the way, I’m a nightmare of a client, always say no to me but —

Alex: Why? No, now we have to unpack that. Why are you —

Shonna: This is where I’m going. I do so much like embodied self-coaching that then I get to the session, I’m like, “Oh, gosh, how do I wanna spend it? What do we wanna talk about?” So even the idea of can we use AI in a very conversational, simplistic tool, to even help someone get to the point of clarity on what they want to work on so I don’t spend the first half of every coaching session figuring out or meandering around the real issue I want to dig into or just reducing some of the cognitive load of the coach on coaching someone this morning, it’s like going back, what did we talk about last time? What are the accountability mechanisms? I need to be driving, like automatically put that on my calendar so I remember to reach out and check in on something. Just there’s so many different ways I think that we can use these tools that don’t even necessarily have to touch the direct coaching experience. So I think we have to just like get over some of the fear and lore of it and just say it’s a tool, like anything else, just like we were, the video will never work and it will degrade and everything, the same is true for a lot of this.

Alex: Yeah. So much to unpack there around just the use of technology and so we can think about technology in the next five, ten years as helping coaches be better coaches, helping them be more efficient and effective in between sessions, helping the coachee unpack things that perhaps are better unpacked in their own time with the use of an AI model essentially and how that all connects in terms of rethinking the overall coaching experience, making it more effective, more impactful. The area that I’m the most excited about is how we can use AI to help coaches be better coaches, because coaching supervision is something that, in the US, we’ve never really followed the way they do in other countries like the UK and Australia, and we’re never going to catch up so I feel like this is our way in the US, specifically, to actually bypass the fact that we’ve completely avoided coach supervision as a serious matter and now we can just use technology to provide supervision and coach mentoring, to provide immediate feedback, to connect that to different development models. I mean, I feel like we’re actually getting to the golden age of coaching and it’s fueled by technology. and I think it’s happening now and I see the next five to ten years as really a — maybe more the five to ten years, like in five years, I think, because there’s a lot of different things going on right now, some of them will work, some of them won’t work, I do feel like with all the buzz of AI everywhere, I do think that for coaching, it will take a couple years to actually be solidified into something that we can all recognize as specific approaches of the use of technology and specifically AI in coaching. But let’s say from 2027 to 2032, I think that’s very specific which predictions in technology is a terrible thing to do, but I do think that by the beginning of the 2030s, the way we think about coaching and implementing it as coaches and as coaching practice leaders in organizations is going to be completely different.

Shonna: Yeah. I mean, I kind of hope so. I just think, in general, there’s huge opportunity, and not just with coaching, with everything, to just rethink the way we’re doing things and get much more precise about what generates value, where and when and under what conditions and allow us to do the things that really give us energy and that are uniquely human. One of the things for me that I get really excited about on this notion of making coaches better is consistent theme through my work, my career is how do we get good science to be more accessible, practical, useful, impactful, and what I mean by this is, often, there’s about a 20-year on average gap between new insight being generated through research and actually being used in practice. That science to practice loop is just really long, largely because scientists often just talk to each other through journals. Now, that’s shifting a bit over time with more scientists, I think, orienting towards a broader audience. But —

Alex: But that 20-year cycle doesn’t work anymore with the speed of change.

Shonna: No, it doesn’t. And so part of the appeal to me for platforms like BetterUp is when the organizations are both conducting research and have the opportunity to be an intervention mechanism themselves. If you can loop those things together well, now imagine that I’m coaching and technology can pick up on, “Oh, you’re talking about X topic, our research has found that this intervention has the largest effect size for this particular problem set. Here’s how you do it,” and there’s a pop-up that gives me guidance on that, like that is now something that would have never been accessible at scale to all coaches, you have to come from a very particular background, just happened to have studied that particular topic, it’s just like there’s limits to human capacity and that means that our clients now have access to the best available evidence to help them solve their problems. So I think that’s really exciting stuff and if we stay really client focused on what are we trying to do for them, I think technology can be a huge tool in that.

Alex: Absolutely. And that’s you’re saying that, I remembered something that I used to talk with David Peterson a lot about and I think we’re doing a little David Peterson homage today since he recently passed so unfortunately and in such an untimely manner, but he was quite a giant of our space and an incredible person too so it’s — I’m getting to that stage of the grieving process where talking about him is nice and you get all like smiley just thinking about the person, so just what a legend David Peterson. One of the things that David was always very concerned about was that — it’s really related to coaching effectiveness and the effectiveness of a coach and, oftentimes, coaches pander to their clients a little bit because they want to be liked. And as a coach, you’re running a business, that’s an essential component of the relationship with the client. I mean, if they don’t like working with you, they don’t like you, chances are they won’t renew your contract or they won’t want to keep working with you, so one of the challenges when you’re thinking about systemically managing coaches at scale is to make sure that coaches are effective and that when you’re measuring that effectiveness, you’re actually looking at effectiveness and not satisfaction, because it’s just so easy for a coach to start gaming the system if the system is just essentially — and coaches, in my experience, are very well intentioned people but when the system is measuring satisfaction and calling it effectiveness, you have a systemic problem and that’s something that David always anchored on and I thought it was so important. And I think that with technology, there’s less of a space for us to hide in terms of is my impact as a coach in this system as effective as me talking about how effective I am as a coach, is there a match there, and I think that is one of the areas where technology is going to push us as coaches to be better because, eventually, there will be less places to hide in the area of satisfaction and you’ll really have to be able to prove that you’re an effective coach in driving the right outcomes forward when you’re working with people. So I think that’s a fascinating area of development in coaching at the moment. What do you think?

Shonna: Yeah. I mean, that’s my love language, of course, is the intersection of measurement with all these things. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, this is something that we obsess about a lot at BetterUp is how do you define coaching effectiveness. Our measurement model includes over 35 characteristics and we’re looking at mindsets, behaviors, and outcomes, we’re measuring at multiple time points, and we really define effectiveness as growth on those things, but it’s tricky because the coach can’t control everything. Coach behaviors account for part of that growth, member coachee behaviors account for some of that growth.

Alex: It reminded me of LMX, that’s the trauma that you have when you go to grad school. Remember, LMX.

Shonna: I know, I know, I’m sorry.

Alex: Leader-Member Exchange Theory, I’m like, well, that’s nothing on structural equation modeling, multi-level structural equation modeling, I still can’t recover from that. 

Shonna: I know, then they start mixing with meta analysis. It all gets very complicated. 

Alex: Let’s not lose all our listeners.

Shonna: No, no. And then the context also matters. Things like organizational support or managerial support for the transfer of these changes on the job and things like that, all of it matters. And, today, what we’re relying on is we have a lot of strong positions or beliefs, just like any profession, so one of them is you don’t give advice, generally speaking. Now, that’s not always true. There’s direct communication and it’s really about giving the —

Alex: Shonna, that’s so late 2000s.

Shonna: I know, I know. But you can still give agency when you’re giving advice and all that, but I think there are these questions though about competency models are generated through a process of getting a bunch of experts, practitioners together and saying, “What does good look like? What are these behaviors?” but it’s really rare that’s actually validated against a criterion like effectiveness. And so I’m really excited about the research we’re doing with ICF and with Joel, specifically on, okay, let’s take these competencies, these behaviors, and can we say which ones really drive outcomes most strongly? What matters most? Do we see anything that actually doesn’t have the effect we expect on coaching outcomes and things like that?

Alex: As far as I understand, the ICF competencies are not validated, are they?

Shonna: Well, they’re validated from a content validation perspective, which is standard. I mean, that is best practice for competency models —

Alex: Yeah, content validation, for sure. 

Shonna: Yeah. The research they did to put that together is super impressive. They won an award for it. Actually, HumRRO supported them in that work and it’s certified coaches, trained coaches who led that work and everything, so it’s really well done and it wasn’t criterion related because nobody does that for competency models, but they have an appetite to do so and I think that’ll be a great learning field. Because let’s find out. Diener was just doing the thing on positive provocation. Let’s not take anything for granted. Let’s really challenge ourselves. 

Alex: I love his book. He sent it to me, I have to read it, I have it right there. It looks like a great book. I’m taking it this summer wherever I end up going. I’m going to read that book. It looks very — I like a good provocation. 

Shonna: Yes, I still have to order it but I love the whole premise.

Alex: Maybe he’ll hear this and he’ll send it to you.

Shonna: I’ll send you my address. But, yeah, so I think that kind of thing, though, is now available to us through this kind of research opportunities.

Alex: As we head to the latter stages of our conversation today, so what are you excited about? We’re talking about the next five, ten years, what gets Shonna excited?

Shonna: Yeah, well, I am very excited about continuing to explore through very open and experimental lens technology and humans and what is the best fit under what circumstances and where and how do we turn that dial to increase access and quality and sort of the right fit. So at BetterUp, we talk about precision development at scale so it’s really like the right intervention at the right time for the right person, it’s that. I think that that concept is going to really come to life now that we have more data, more AI tools, things like that. So I’m really excited about that. I’m excited about the attention being paid increasingly on cross cultural sensitivity. That, to me, we have a lot of work to do there. I know a lot of coaching models and research have been done on Western audiences and I know, for me, I went to an amazing coach training program and I did not come out fully equipped to really understand how to responsibly do that at scale. And, similarly, I’m really excited about the ability to start to explore these boundaries between different professions and practices. So, for example, therapy mentoring, things like that. I know there’s a big push right now to get more fluency for coaches on mental health first aid and things like that, same with managers. I think that’s really important, especially as we extend access to coaching to earlier career populations, more diverse populations. I think we really have to think about how that responsibility shifts and what we’re exposed to and confronting might shift and how to do that well.

Alex: Cool. I love how you’re always at the intersection of research and science and practice. It’s a great place to be and I think it’s much needed in our world today. And thank you so much for joining us, Shonna. I always have fun when I talk to you and it was fun to do it in the podcast so thanks for joining me today.

Shonna: Thank you, Alex. Always a pleasure.