Todd Cherches: CEO, Leadership & Executive Coach at BigBlueGumball and Author of “VisuaLeadership”

A conversation with Todd Cherches, CEO and co-founder of Big Blue Gumball, explores the innovative concept of visual leadership. 

Cherches, transitioning from the entertainment industry to leadership coaching, emphasizes the significance of visual thinking in enhancing communication, understanding, and engagement within teams. 

He discusses how leveraging visual metaphors and storytelling can clarify complex ideas, making leadership more accessible and impactful. Cherches shares insights into his coaching methodology, which incorporates visual tools to facilitate deeper understanding and transformative learning experiences. 

This approach underscores the importance of adaptability, creativity, and innovative thinking in leadership and coaching, offering valuable strategies for leaders looking to articulate their vision more effectively and foster a more collaborative and inspired team environment. 

Through this conversation, Cherches provides a compelling look at how visual leadership techniques can revolutionize the way leaders communicate and engage with their teams.

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee
Todd Cherches

(interview blurb)

Todd: My personal mission statement is making the world a better place one leader at a time, and, to me, everyone is a leader even if you’re just leading your own life.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is the CEO and co-founder of BigBlueGumball, a New York City-based leadership development and executive coaching firm. He’s also a three-time award-winning Adjunct Professor of Leadership at NYU and Columbia. He’s also a TEDx speaker and author of VisuaLeadership: Leveraging the Power of Visual Thinking in Leadership and Life. Please welcome Todd Cherches.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Todd.

Todd: Alex, great to see you. It’s been a while. 

Alex: Nice to see you as well. I know, it has been a little bit of time. Thank you for joining me today. Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today?

Todd: Well, I don’t drink coffee but I’m an iced tea person so I’m drinking my Zevia raspberry iced tea. Hopefully, I’ll get an endorsement deal after giving them this plug, but it is my favorite beverage. I’m trying to get off soda so I switched to this iced tea.

Alex: Could be Zevia is interested in really expanding with the coaches. They’ll be known as the iced tea of all the leadership executive and business coaches in the world.

Todd: That would be amazing. I’ll be happy to be their spokesperson. 

Alex: Much better than soda. Coke is definitely — Coca-Cola Company is never going to sponsor this podcast because the two times someone has requested Diet Coke, I probably said a little remark that maybe I shouldn’t, but you can’t win them all. 

Todd: That’s true.

Alex: I’m actually matching you with iced tea but I’m actually doing kombucha, which I actually put some ice on kind of to match you to make it a little colder and I love kombucha so it’s technically tea so I guess I’m matching you with iced tea.

Todd: That sounds great. That sounds great.

Alex: Let’s introduce you, Todd, to all of our listeners by kind of taking us through your journey. How did you end up becoming a coach and developing your framework in visual leadership? I’m sure it’s been a very interesting journey. And, actually, I say that but I actually know your journey because we were part of an MG, Marshall Goldsmith 100 group and that group, we have those, if you’re part of the MG100, sometimes, we do kind of like a series of about two- to three-month, intensive, every Friday you meet with other coaches and get to know everything about who they are, how they became a coach, and it’s super fun so Todd and I were in one of those groups together so I know your story but I’m going to get a refresher today, which is awesome, and I’m sure most of the people listening don’t know your story so please get us started. 

Todd: Yeah, so those groups are great because so often we’re in breakout sessions and you get to talk to people for like three or four minutes so it’s nice to really take a deep dive and get to know people the way you introduce people on this terrific show that you have. So what’s interesting is I love the theme because I’m a big Jerry Seinfeld fan and he has his Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and a few people have referred to me as the Seinfeld of leadership. So I come from New York, I talk fast, I’m from Long Island, so people may pick up a little bit of my accent. So I love the theme of your show which I enjoy listening to. So, the short version is, and I talked about this in my TED talk on the power of visual thinking, people have asked me as a kid what do you want to be when you grow up and I said, I would say Superman. That was like everything was Superman. And they said, “Well, if you can’t be Superman, what would you like to be?” and I said, “All right, then Batman.” So those were my only career options at that point in my life. And then I realized as I grew up that those jobs were taken so I figured pursuing a career in television would be a good career for me. So I started — I majored in English literature, I got a master’s in communication, I worked in advertising in New York for a year and then moved out to Hollywood and I lived in LA for 10 years and I had a number of jobs in the entertainment industry, including at Disney and at CBS developing TV shows, and then I was a project manager in the theme park business where I went to China for a project which I talked about in my TED Talk and that’s my background in the entertainment and media industry. And then I got laid off a couple of times and then I decided to move back to New York and that’s how I got into management, leadership development, and then, eventually, executive coaching. So that’s the short version of how I started in entertainment and media but evolved into executive coaching and leadership coaching, which is what I do today. 

Alex: That’s awesome. Thank you. Do you remember the first time you heard about this thing called coaching?

Todd: I actually do because I’m a reader of the New Yorker magazine, which I’ve read for many years, for probably 30 years. There was an article, I wrote down the name — the title of the article was called “The Better Boss” and it’s from 2002 and they talked about this guy named Marshall Goldsmith who did executive coaching and I had never heard of it before. I had done like training, like leadership development and training, but never coaching and I read this article and the light bulb went off. I just thought, wow, I would love to do this, this is something I could see myself doing. So at one point I had looked into becoming a psychotherapist or something in that area and it didn’t happen but there’s a lot of connections between therapy and coaching, although they’re in separate silos, but just helping other people become their best selves and helping people — I always talk about three P’s, performance, productivity, and potential, so I always try to help people through my training and my coaching and now I teach at NYU and Columbia, I teach leadership into master’s program. It’s all about helping people become the best version of themselves. But that’s the answer to your question. Until I had read that article and heard of this guy Marshall Goldsmith, I had never even heard of executive coaching. And then I read his What Got You Here Won’t Get You There when they came out in 2007 or 2008 and I actually went to a — he was doing a feedforward workshop here in New York City and I went to it and I met him for the very first time and whoever could have dreamed that I would be in 100 Coaches with Marshall all these years later. So it’s just interesting and amazing how some things happen and you go down a path and you literally never know where it might lead.

Alex: Absolutely. You went through a pretty major career shift, going from living in Hollywood, going back to New York, kind of finding a new path. Do you find that having had that experience helps you in your coaching? 

Todd: Yeah. Earlier in my career, I had a reputation as being a job hopper because I had changed jobs and careers numerous times. Now, people look at my resume and say, “Wow, it’s amazing how many different things you’ve done,” right? So I think the stigma of job hopping has changed but just coming out of the entertainment and media industry and having a background in English literature and Shakespeare, I still use so many — in fact, that’s the foundation of my visual leadership and my visual coaching technique is helping — my motto is how do you get people to see what you’re saying? So how do you get an idea out of your head and into someone else’s head? As a leader, you have a vision, you have a picture in your mind’s eye of a future state that’s different from and better than the current reality, how do you make that vision a reality? And through my coaching process and methodology, which I call Visual Leadership, I help people to achieve those objectives. So my coaching approach is very much grounded in my background from the entertainment and media industry. 

Alex: Well, with those degrees, literature, you’re probably really good at ChatGPT prompts.

Todd: I am pretty good. In fact, what’s interesting, I actually put in who are the top thought leaders in the field of visual thinking and I thought maybe I’d be on the list. I came up first, which was crazy to see Dan Roam and Nancy Duarte and some of these other big names on the list but, somehow — so I guess I put it in the right prompt. That was crazy.

Alex: So tell me about visual leadership. What is it? What’s the story, the history behind it? 

Todd: Sure. 

Alex: And how did you end up number one on the ChatGPT ranking?

Todd: Yeah, it’s pretty amazing. It’s crazy. The idea behind visual leadership is that who you are and how you lead is inseparable from the lens through which you see the world. So we all have a paradigm, we have a lens through which we see the world that’s shaped by our background, our upbringing, our culture, our life experiences, our successes, our failures. What we see and what we miss and don’t see are a direct result of who we are and how we grew up and how we came to be who we are today and that shapes who we are as a manager, as a leader, as a coach. So what I help people do is to take a look through a different lens, to continue that metaphor, and I always say when you’re thinking about leadership, it’s about the future and looking far and wide so you’re looking through a telescope; when you’re managing, you’re looking through a microscope down and deep into the details; and when you’re innovating, you’re looking through a kaleidoscope, using all the colors of the rainbow. So just those three metaphors, the telescope, the microscope, and the kaleidoscope, is a visual metaphor to help people to see things through a different lens. So, again, that’s the metaphor. And I break it down into four categories using visual imagery, mental models and frameworks, metaphor and analogy, and storytelling and humor as kind of like the four categories. So, the coaching techniques and tools that I use with my clients are all grounded in those different methodologies to help people to kind of see things and see possibilities in ways that maybe they hadn’t thought of before. 

Alex: What’s the origin of visual leadership? You mentioned other people in the field, you’re number one, as ranked by ChatGPT 3.5 or 4.0, I’m not sure which one you used, so what’s like the genesis of visual leadership?

Todd: Design thinking and visual thinking is kind of in its infancy, or was about 15 years ago, and the key thought leaders were people like Dave Sibbett out of the Grove in San Francisco and Nancy Duarte and Garr Reynolds. Those were some — and Dan Roam, who wrote the book The Back of the Napkin, and then Sunni Brown and Dave Gray. So I started reading all of these books on using design thinking and visual thinking but no one was really applying those techniques to the world of leadership and coaching. I think that’s where, if you picture a Venn diagram, you have visual thinking people and then you have leadership and management people and coaches, if you connect the two, only Dave Sibbett who wrote the book on visual leaders, but that was more about using drawing techniques and things like that, which I do a little bit but that’s just a small piece of what I do, so I basically integrated the traditional world of like Harvard Business School kind of management leadership with visual thinking and came up with a whole new way of looking at leadership and coaching using these techniques in a different context. 

Alex: Tell me a little bit more about your experience putting that together. So you come from different background, coming into this field of leadership development, take me through those initial years and through that transition.

Todd: Yeah, well, after working for those years in the TV industry and then the theme park business, I moved back to New York and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do and I ended up with a job at the American Management Association where they needed someone to revamp their mini MBA program, it was four sessions, four one-week sessions, management, finance, marketing, and leadership and they needed someone to redesign the program so they figured that — what’s interesting is I didn’t have an MBA, I had a master’s in communication, but they thought based on my business background I was able to do it and I had the knowledge to do it, so, in order to do it, I had to start reading all these management leadership books and the light bulb went off and I realized that managing and leading and coaching was an art and a science, like it’s something that most people were never trained to do. Most people are thrown into manager roles because they’re good at what they do. “You’re our top salesperson, now you’re our sales manager,” “You’re top IT guy, now you’re running the department,” right? But that’s a different skill set. To manage people, lead people, coach people, not everyone has those skills and I realized — I don’t know if you know I hold the Guinness Book of World Record for having worked for the worst bosses who’ve ever set foot on this planet so that’s one of my claims to fame from when I worked in Hollywood, I just worked for one tyrannical, dysfunctional toxic boss after another, but reading all these books and working with these expert trainers and facilitators made me realize that you could learn how to manage and lead. So I got hooked on business books and I started reading one after another after another and that was in 1998 and I read a couple hundred and I’ve continued that habit, it’s now 25 years later and I read an average of one business book a week so that’s 50 a year over the last 25 years. I’m well into like 1,200, almost 1,300 business books.

Alex: Wow. How do you have that diligence to read one business book a — I have so many questions. How long it can happen, how do you source your books and — well, I’ll stop there and then I’ll ask you about your favorites. 

Todd: Well, what’s interesting is being a part of the Marshall Goldsmith MG100 community, we are surrounded by authors all over the place, right? So, every time a book comes out by a Chester Elton or a John Baldoni or a Peter Bregman, whoever, or Marshall, there’s another book to read, right? So just keeping up with our community —

Alex: That’s only a month worth of reading for you.

Todd: It’s impossible. So, I mean, there might be some months where I read five or ten bucks, another month where I may only read one or two, but it averages out. In fact, I just hit 50 for this year so I have two more to read to hit my 52 target. During the pandemic, I read 101 business books in 2021 because I had the time because of the pandemic to do some more reading. 

Alex: So what are your top three business books of all time? 

Todd: Well, number one, I would have to say VisuaLeadership, even though that’s biased. 

Alex: Yeah. Okay, that doesn’t count. I mean, I think ChatGPT will be very disappointed with that.

Todd: Number one is Marshall’s What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. I mean, that was my coaching bible for so many years. I mean —

Alex: I have it somewhere here pretty close, I think.

Todd: I have it right above me, it’s within arm’s length. So, to me, those 20 workplace habits you need to break, being the smartest person in the room, needing to win too much, all those things. I mean, that’s the foundation of so much of my coaching work. So thank you to Marshall for that. And his books, Triggers and Mojo, and just reading everything Marshall wrote, but especially What Got You Here. Dan Pink’s Drive on motivation is a big one for me. Number of Adam Grant’s books, Seth Godin’s books are all amazing so it’s really hard. If people — in the back of my book or if people just go to my website, toddcherches.com, the pop-up is people could download the top 52 books that had the greatest influence on my thinking so anyone’s welcome to do that. So just off the top of my head, I have all my books on the shelves above me so as I glance up, a lot of Peter Drucker, Warren Bennis. So, again, just being a sponge and absorbing all of these frameworks and concepts around what it means to manage and lead have all like become part of the way I think and so when I combine all of this Harvard Business Review and all these traditional management leadership books and work with my background in entertainment and media, that’s, again, where the visual leadership approach came from. And as I was designing management leadership training programs, people kept saying to me, “You’re always quoting all these other books and all these other people, you need to write your own book,” and that’s what triggered my starting to write my book and I’ve worked on it for probably 15 years before I finally got an agent, got a book deal, and got published.

Alex: Before we talk about that, what are your top three books of this year?

Todd: Of this year? Well, one, I have to give a shout-out to Becoming Coachable by Scott Osman, Jacquelyn Lane, and Marshall Goldsmith. There’s so many books on how to coach people but that’s an amazing book on how to be more coachable, which is something that we don’t think about so I would put that on the list. I have in Her Own Voice by our colleague, Jennifer McCollum, which is targeted towards women but it really appeals to allies for women and really anyone. In fact, my NYU students, I teach in the HR master’s program, and about 80 percent of my students are female so it’s definitely become a top recommendation for them and that literally just came out a few weeks ago. If I had to pick one other, I’m looking at my shelves above, Leading Inclusion by Gena Cox is a really good book on being a more inclusive leader. So I would just off the top of my head, out of the 50 I read this year, those are three that really have resonated with me.

Alex: All very timely books. So, how has it been to develop your kind of theory of visual leadership? A lot of coaches listening in have the pressure of finding their niche, finding your niche is such an important thing in today’s world for coaches and difficult because you have to find something that you’re really passionate about. Kind of like when you were in grad school, I remember you have to pick your dissertation topic and that’s a little bit different because you pick it and you work on it and hopefully you like it and it inspires you to get it done but it’s not necessary to have to be super happy and it’s not the rest of your life. It could be if you do a really good job picking your dissertation topic, that really cascades into a very specific area of expertise, but for many of us, it was just the way to get your PhD. When it comes to your coaching though, you want to make sure that you lead and breathe the specialty that you choose and I’ve talked to a lot of coaches that feel tremendous pressure to find this specialization because it is such a major differentiator as a coach and you have to find something that not only appeals to you but it’s marketable and also is going to actually help people navigate through the challenges they face. So, putting all that together, it’s like there’s a lot that goes into that decision because maybe you find something you love but it’s not marketable, or maybe it’s marketable but it’s not something that helps people that much so there’s so many things that need to come together. So, tell me about your journey for actually developing it and packaging it, marketing it, and using it with clients. 

Todd: Yeah. That’s a great question because what’s nice is when it evolves organically as opposed to forcing it or a lot of — Maslow had that quote, if the only tool you have is a hammer, you treat everything as if it’s a nail, so a lot of coaches only have that one tool, like I only do Myers Briggs or I only do whatever that cool tool or methodology is, and then you kind of force feed it into your clients as opposed to having — using the metaphor, here’s a great example of visual thinking, if you go to Home Depot or Lowe’s and you buy a toolkit, you have all these different tools, right? You have a hammer and wrench and screwdriver. You need different tools for different things. So, similarly, as a coach, you want to have a toolkit of different tools and techniques in your toolkit that you have mastered, that you’re skilled in using. And we always talk about having a mindset tool set and skill set, right? You have to have the mindset to understand and to think in a certain way, the tools in your toolkit, but you also have to have the skills to use those tools. So we need to kind of develop something that works well for us that we believe in, that we have a passion for. So when I’m talking about visual thinking, I don’t have to fake it, I don’t have to sell anyone because it just comes through in my voice because it has always worked for me. So it may not resonate with everyone but, again, as human beings, we are wired for story, we are wired for visuals. That’s the way I think and I help use some of these techniques to help other people find the visual thinker and visual communicator within them. So, for example, a real life example, I might use emojis and say, “Of the sheet of 20 emojis, which face represents how you’re feeling today?” Because you may ask the client, “How are you doing today?” and they may say, “Fine,” but that doesn’t get you anywhere. But if someone says, “I pick emoji, row A, number four,” and they pick that face, there’s a thought process there. Why did they pick that face? Is it the one with the teardrop or the smile? And what’s the why behind it? So that’s a good visual prompt to ask follow-up questions, “Why did you pick that one and not this one?” Did they pick the one with the Z’s where I’m exhausted and tired, I’m falling asleep today? Well, why? What’s going on in your life? Sometimes, I’ll actually have clients pick up a pen and draw, draw how you’re feeling today, do it do a sketch and it could be a metaphor, it could be a mind map or a process diagram. But, again, if you get people to use a different part of their brain, they will start to kind of dissect their problems in a different way and then you can see things in a new light and then find solutions. So, again, that’s just a quick example. I use a lot of prompts. So on my desk, I have a Curious George doll, I’ll tell my clients there’s no magic wand, you have to do the work. If a client is being inflexible, I may hold this up and say you need to be more flexible. For people watching on video, you’re seeing this. If you’re listening on audio, I’m holding up a Gumby, so Gumby — so I’m visually representing or mentioning Gumby for those who may be listening, so that’s a good point about visual thinking, visual communication, it’s not always through pictures and through our eye but we can also take in visuals through our ear and through our mind’s eye so that’s a key point to keep in mind. So another technique I use is stop, start, and continue. I’m holding up a traffic light, right? What’s working well that you want to continue? What do you need to stop doing? What should you start doing? So, that’s just a small sampling of how I use visual imagery, props, and metaphors as coaching prompts to trigger conversations so I’ll leave it there but I have a million more examples. Other than this one, what’s the elephant in the room? I’m holding up a stuffed elephant right now, and I’ll tell my clients, last one, their thinking is outdated, I’ll hold up this dinosaur, I don’t even have to say a word, I just hold up this Tyrannosaurus Rex and say, “All right, you may be thinking in an old-fashioned kind of way.” 

Alex: I can see that approach working with certain people and I can see other people kind of maybe not finding it as appealing. Tell me about the universality of your approach? 

Todd: Yeah. Well, here’s the thing, there is no one size fits all solution for anything. So if this approach doesn’t resonate with you, then I may not be the best coach for you and I’m happy to hand you off or refer you to someone else. So, when I do chemistry calls, a lot of times, in addition to having my own clients, I’m actually an associate of a number of other coaching companies where sometimes, including 100 Coaches Agency, where I’m brought in for chemistry call and the coachee will choose between three clients that they interview. I’m very clear about this methodology so for people who are creative, for people who love storytelling, for people who want to leverage that side of their brain, or even if you’re not and you have a need to go down this path, that would resonate with people, but if someone says, “You know what, this doesn’t really fit well with me,” then I’ll just say then it’s not the right, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Yeah, I never take it personally. But other people, especially people in creative fields, love this approach because it really elevates it and leverages that creative side of their brains to see problems through a new lens. And one of things I say is you can’t think outside the box unless you have a box with something in it so some people might say, “Oh, thinking outside the box is a worn-out cliché,” but other people say, “Yeah, what’s in that box? What’s in my box and how can I open that box? And let some things out and let some other things in,” so, again, it’s just about using visual language and metaphor and stories to help our clients see things and see new possibilities. 

Alex: What did you learn from working for some of the world’s worst bosses?

Todd: I was just telling someone — one of my favorite songs, I was talking about Elvis Costello and his song “(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” because we all need a little more of that in today’s day and age. So what I learned is that, as a coach or as a leader, are you a ray of sunshine or are you a cloud of doom and gloom? So use that visual metaphor. Most of the bosses I worked for were not only clouds of doom and gloom but they were thunder and lightning. Thunder and lightning. You would walk in that day and just be their whipping boy or just say, abused. I actually kept an abuse log when I worked for one of the TV networks just as a sanity check and just to document how my boss was treating me, I tell a story in my book on my love letter to Horrible Bosses, which is at the beginning of my book, about the boss at — I won’t mention which TV network but it has a C, a B, and an S in its name. So, my boss at that time threw a box of pens at my head because they were not the ones she wanted. She wanted the fine point and these were the medium point.

Alex: That sounds reasonable, you know?

Todd: I said to my students when I’m teaching feedback, let’s say if you were a manager and your assistant ordered the wrong pens, is there any other way to communicate that feedback to them? It’s like, nope, throwing it at their head is the only way you’re going to get your point across. 

Alex: I mean, it probably worked. 

Todd: Well, it’s memorable, I’m still talking about 30 years later. So, in terms of impact, it definitely resonates with me. But, yeah, I learned how not to treat people, I learned how not to manage, I learned how not to lead, I learned how to destroy people’s morale and motivation so that’s what I learned from the bad bosses and I set off on this journey and my personal mission statement is making the world a better place one leader at a time, and, to me, everyone is a leader even if you’re just leading your own life. So that’s kind of like my foundational mission statement and then I build on that from there as opposed to tearing people down, how can we as coaches build people up and I figured if I can make help one boss be a better boss and not be that kind of stereotypical, tyrannical, abusive boss, then that will cascade down and impact many people for years to come after that. 

Alex: Have you thought about what are some of your top leadership lessons from Seinfeld?

Todd: Oh, so many. One is do the opposite, George Costanza’s do the opposite, right? Because Jerry says if everything you’ve ever done is wrong, the opposite would have to be right, so I sometimes incorporate some Seinfeld into my coaching and say this to a client, “Well, what if instead of doing that, what if you did the opposite what would happen?” so it’s — I use a lot of Seinfeld references. Again, that doesn’t resonate with everyone. A lot of my students, for example, are international students, like from China, so a 25-year-old female from China may not know who Seinfeld is and usually doesn’t so I have to modify my references. But for those who know, it becomes definitely a common reference point,

Alex: We should make it required for the student visa application.

Todd: To watch all — to watch every Seinfeld episode, all nine seasons. But I actually talk about that, like I wrote a blog post called the Opposite of VUCA where I used Seinfeld as one of the metaphors. We live in a VUCA world, right? That is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. What is the opposite of that? So in a world of volatility, leaders need to calm things down. In a world of uncertainty, leaders need to separate what we’re certain about from what we’re not. In a world of complexity, how can we simplify complexity? In a world of ambiguity, how do we find some clarity? So the opposite of VUCA is CCSC so your job as a leader is to try to — what’s the antidote of living in a VUCA world? So one of my executive coaching clients, I was just talking to them about that the other day, because he was overwhelmed by all the stress and all the chaos in the world and I said, “Well, let’s go through each of those, you know, the VUCA, find the opposite, and then say, all right, what can you actually do about it to help create a more calm team and organization?” So that’s just one example of doing the Costanza, doing the opposite, helped him to find a path forward. 

Alex: I love that episode. He ends up getting a job at the New York Yankees doing the opposite. I remember, “George Costanza, who are you?” “I’m the opposite of every man you’ve ever met.” 

Todd: Exactly, exactly.

Alex: I love Seinfeld, obviously.

Todd: That’s a whole book right there, leadership lessons from Seinfeld. I mean, again, the references just — I got to be friends with Michael Gelb, a little shout-out to him, he wrote the book 25 years ago, it’s How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, and I got to be friends with him because he’s in the 100 Coaches group and we went through stakeholder-centered coaching together and got certified, that’s how we met, but he’s a huge Seinfeld fan and I got him, when he invited me over to his house. I got him a gift basket of every food product that was mentioned in Seinfeld, Snickers and —

Alex: That’s amazing.

Todd: — $100,000, Bosco, I just went all — it was fun for me to go on the scavenger hunt. 

Alex: 100 Grand Bar, yeah.

Todd: Yeah, so that was a lot of fun putting that together. A babka, a little chocolate babka from New York. 

Alex: That’s awesome. Well, I’m glad you picked up on that reference with our podcast. And it doesn’t always have to be coffee but the name, it’s an homage to Jerry —

Todd: Yeah, the name is great.

Alex: — which we love so, yeah. And it was a child of the pandemic, this podcast, where the idea of sharing a drink with someone remotely and have a good conversation kind of made a lot of sense. And now it makes a lot of sense still because I think we really became a lot more comfortable with remote meetings and really fostering deeper connections virtually because we had to. I still remember not that long ago, maybe 10, 15 years ago, and the conversation — I always say 10, 15 years ago and I’m starting to realize that I need to start kind of going a little bit more back. I’m resisting it. So, yeah, going back, let’s say 17, 20 years ago, I remember that conversation was really all around is coaching as effective over the phone as it is in person? And we didn’t know and actually a lot of people questioned it and I think research supports that it is as effective or it can be as effective. I personally have always advocated for the first meeting in person. Well, before the pandemic and before I was getting so used to video conferencing, I’ve always was a fan of do the first meeting in person and then take it from there. But now, I think I’ve had great clients that I’ve just met virtually so it’s really a different world, isn’t it, Todd?

Todd: Yeah. I mean, do you ever forget — like sometimes I forget who I know from in person and who I only know from Zoom, right? So that happens all the time. But, yeah, I still do the same thing, first and last sessions in person and all the middle ones remotely. At the time, it was through FaceTime because Zoom wasn’t even around. 

Alex: I know. And height too is another thing that’s interesting. So I know the first time I met you, I was like, “Wow, you’re really tall.” I’m tall, I’m six-one, but then you find people that are six-four, six-seven. I was at Thinker’s 50 recently and there was someone there was like seven-three and everyone’s like, “Who is that person?” And MBS that just won the Marshall Goldsmith Coaching and Mentoring Award sponsored by Coaching.com, that just won it, he’s so tall. I had no idea how tall he was. It’s interesting. 

Todd: Yeah, on Zoom, we’re all the same height. It’s the great leveler. But real life example of that, I was talking to a client, he’s in a wheelchair and he was saying that one of the things about Zoom was it leveled the playing field, something that I hadn’t thought about before because he said when he would go to a networking event, he would always feel lost in the crowd but on Zoom, people didn’t even know, it wasn’t even part of the conversation. One thing that we talked about was how can he, even when he goes to an in-person event, still leverage that, like how can he transition, so it’s interesting, just like you’re saying, some people are taller, some people are shorter, it’s just interesting how the connections we make on Zoom and on LinkedIn. Before the pandemic, I had 3,000 LinkedIn connections, I’m now up to 13,000, and I have friends all — I just met with a guy, Benno Erhardt, who I got to be friends with on LinkedIn, he was in New York the other day and we met up for coffee and we walked around the city, I took him to the New York Public Library and he’s from Lichtenstein. I had never met anyone from Lichtenstein before. So, it’s just amazing how, through Zoom, we can coach people. And I think that’s the key thing is like how do you create that connection and that human contact even if you’re not physically in the same space? What’s the equivalent of that? Because I had to do that with my NYU and Columbia teaching when we went to the online to Zoom when the pandemic hit. I had to figure out how do I keep making it experiential and connect with my students and help them connect to each other, one another, even though they were virtual, so it’s a challenge. It can be done but we need to figure out with this medium, how can we still do that. But it’s always great to meet like a coaching client in person after you’ve been working with them. One of them I worked with for two years until I finally met him in person. 

Alex: Yeah, very interesting and leadership looks differently in this kind of setup, especially for fully remote companies.

Todd: Yeah.

Alex: Lots of interesting articles that I’ve seen around how to, let’s say, work on executive presence when you’re part of a globally distributed company. So really, really interesting.

Todd: Yeah, how do you onboard people? How do you create culture? How do you build teams, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, to me, I would say the hardest topic in my executive coaching is undo the habit of managing and leading in a post-pandemic hybrid world. You have the return to office, you have the work from home, you have the hybrid. Managers are just trying to figure out how do I achieve our organizational objectives while still meeting the objectives of each individual employee and, again, some companies are ordering people back to the workforce and losing talent because of that and other people are figuring out a way to navigate it so it’s really — from a coaching perspective, I’m doing a lot of work with executives trying to help them figure out how do we make this work and keep people happy and keep them engaged and retain people who — if you just say everyone starting New Year’s day, or day after New Year’s, everyone has to be back in the office, you may lose some key people who are unable to do that or unwilling to do that, so it’s like how do we navigate that.

Alex: Chances are, you will. As we approach the end of our episode today, what are you excited about?

Todd: Oh, excited about helping people navigate this whole new world. Not to get too Disney and start singing “A Whole New World, a new fantastic point of view,” from Aladdin, but it is, it’s a whole new world, but that’s what’s most exciting about helping people figure out how to succeed in a world where a lot of the rules have changed, the expectations have changed. Again, how do you set people up for success, keep them engaged, and to see possibilities, getting back to that VisuaLeadership metaphor, it’s like you have a vision of what the future looks like, how do you help people, one, formulate that vision and, two, communicate that vision so that other people can get onboard with it, so I think just helping anyone gain more clarity, giving them some more tools in their toolkit, will help to make people more successful. So in my teaching and my coaching and my training, that is what I’m trying to do and that’s what I’m most excited about.

Alex: Amazing. Thank you so much for sharing, Todd. Great having you at the podcast today and keep doing great work.

Todd: Thank you so much, Alex. It was great talking to you.