Conversation

I think this is a common perception in part because people don't realize the degree which the outward facing challenges of doing the job of an executive are very real. It seems insubstantial so they assume "coaching" for it must be code for therapy.
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Imagine if for some reason you were never allowed to watch an actual basketball game or training session, but were allowed to watch/eavesdrop on fragments of the coach and player chatting. You might assume that it's "therapy" with some indecipherable "ball" jargon mixed in
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Actually, if someone's gotten to a high-functioning exec role, there is a *very* good chance that any serious issues that went unaddressed earlier in their careers is actually an adaptive trait for their environment, and it would be a bad idea to try to fix it if it's stable :D
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Marshall Goldsmith (probably the uber exec-coach proper, but of an era where it *was* in fact partly therapy) frames coaching in part as fixing residual things that slipped through the cracks/went unfixed earlier in career and are liabilities now
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I like Goldsmith's ideas and generally have a lot of respect for his era of executive coaching. But his model assumes a sort of Organization Man executive fitting into a Fortune 100 east coast company C-suite. SV execs are kinda the antithesis of that if they're effective at all
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Related: Only about 40% of Fortune 500 CEOs have MBAs. Only 32% globally have MBAs. I suspect the picture is similar down to about VP level. This means about 60-70% of all executives win on domain expertise and pick up commodity biz skills on the job.
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But on-the-job "street" education often comes with narrow sparring practice with people who are either too close to your industry or with the wrong incentives to help you get better. One gap "coaches" fill is to broaden the on-the-job idiosyncratic picking up of biz skills.
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I don't have an MBA. The few other coaches I've met haven't had MBAs either. They're simply people who've picked up biz skills/knowledge randomly along the way and are able to convert it into sparring stress-loading. I suspect typical MBAs wouldn't make good coaches. Too doerist.
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Replying to
As hard as this may be to believe, I’m a level 1 life coach as a result of a work initiative. It was one of the few genuinely interesting professional development experiences I’ve had. The trainers spent a lot of time on the distinction between coaching, mentoring and therapy
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