Approach

Who I Work With

You’re a capable, intentional, effective leader hungry for the next chapter in your leadership journey. But you’re not sure how to make the leap staying true to who you are, the reality of the moment, and what you need to stay energized and inspired going forward.

Common focus areas include:

    • You sit at the senior table, but feel your manager doesn’t see your department as strategically essential. Other leaders throw their weight around, but you know there must be another way.

    • You’ve been told you need more “executive presence,” but the examples your manager points to don’t feel authentic to you.

    • You’re leading an urgent new initiative requiring a shared vision and fast execution, but you feel you lack the time to build the necessary trust within the team.

    • Your manager leads by personality, saying one thing and doing another with team management. You want to preserve your influence, but are tired of doing their job without the title or pay.

    • You’re leading an innovative project that had a major setback. You don’t yet know the cause or organizational impact, but you know you must say something.

    • You’re tasked with communicating a difficult organizational change you don’t fully agree with. You appreciate shaping the message, but don’t want management outsourcing their apology to you.

    • You’ve been promoted to manage your former peers. You must hold them accountable without ruining your relationships.

    • As a proven problem solver, you’re ready for a promotion. Management wants you to coach and delegate more, yet continuously relies on you to save the day.

    • You have a fulfilling career, but new developments outside work are stretching your capacity. You’re unsure what to give up or reimagine to protect what’s sacred.

    • You’re hitting metrics and receiving praise, but leave work feeling empty. You’re exhausted. What drives your colleagues no longer motivates you and you don’t know why.

How I Work: The Coaching Arc

Each coaching relationship is unique and iterative, but most can be described through a coaching arc with five core components:

1) Trust

Building mutual trust in a coaching relationship sets an essential foundation that can’t be rushed. We may discuss topics that are uncomfortable to think about, let alone discuss with someone else. Like many good things, trust grows with time, and you get out what you put in. There are several essential elements to forging trust in coaching, including:

  • Coaching isn’t consulting, mentorship, or therapy. If coaching were a road trip, your coach would be riding shotgun while you were behind the wheel. Through conversation and with support from your coach, you pick the destination. Your coach helps you navigate through a structured conversation about the ride, but you’re always the one driving.

  • We are all trying our best, and coaching should be a shame-free zone. Good coaching comes from radical generosity of interpretation, viewing challenges and beliefs through the most charitable lens.

  • Authentic curiosity reflects genuine passion. Coaching is a dance between two partners; a good coach gets curious about what you care about, as well as what they find fascinating themselves.

  • Vulnerability is a two-way street, but there is no obligation to initiate or reciprocate. Time allows for a slow, safe ramp-up of mutual disclosure at your comfort level.

  • Remembering minor details, like your favorite dessert, may build just as much trust as connecting a conversation to your childhood dreams.

  • The most delicate part of trust is reading how much of it already exists. You deserve a coach who can channel that awareness to appropriately and kindly share something that may be harder to hear, appropriate because it comes from a place of mutual understanding and kind because it comes from a belief in what you’re capable of.

  • Building on a foundation of trust, the early stages of a coaching engagement focus on clarifying the desired destination and the current reality. We can do this in conversation with one another, through independent reflection activities and assessments, and in conversation with collaborators whose feedback you value.

    Based on these input, we’ll sketch out a rough blueprint of how we’ll work towards your goals, knowing that such a blueprint may very well evolve as we explore. Sometimes not knowing exactly where you want to go or how to get there is part of the fun.

    The mind can be a beautiful servant but a dangerous master. So these early conversations are a wonderful time to explore and tap into your emotional, moral, and physiological experiences and priorities that can guide and propel us along the way.

  • Alongside building clarity we’ll also explore ways to expand you capabilities, capabilities that will help you move towards your coaching goals. Some of these may be behaviors, but they could also include strategies, tactics, mindsets, beliefs, frameworks, or even ways of physically moving through the world.

    The process of simply verbalizing your experiences and aspirations with a coach often reveals new strengths and opportunities that independent reflection often can’t access on its own. While there can be value in bolstering relative weaknesses, often times the path towards authentic, sustainable impact is through finding creative and more robust ways to channel your existing passions and strengths.

  • All the clarity and capability in the world is for naught without the confidence to actually embody it. Therefore, a large part of the real work in coaching is experimenting with new ideas in your actual leadership context.

    Real world practice, with the support of a coach, allows leaders to iteratively understand what feels right and what actually works. Along the way, new aspects of your leadership context may come to light that encourage us to evolve your approach.

    Often, leading in a more impactful and fulfilling way is not about doing more but less. Through practice you have the opportunity to notice the behaviors and patterns, conscious or not, that may be keeping you from progress.

    Similarly, making progress on one aspiration can push another priority backwards. One of the most challenging elements of leadership is needing to choose between two seemingly mutually exclusive necessities. Based on real feedback from your environment, we can explore if there may be a third way that affords you the option to not choose.

  • Everyone wants to grow, but few find it fun to change. This can be especially true when what you know you need to change feels like a core part of your identity. Therefore, the most consequential element of coaching is making growth stick.

    With a coach, you have a habits co-designer. Together we can design regular rituals, celebrations, and metrics that can nurture new capabilities, cement hard won confidence, and allow clarity to mature and adapt over time.

    Coaching should feel like a catalytic experience, but more importantly a foundation for continued growth into the future.

“Max is an incredible leadership coach who has the unique ability to be able to meet his clients where they are. This dimensionality creates a very unique, very individual, very constructive environment in which personal growth and development flourishes. I appreciated the empathy shown, the ability to metabolize a situation quickly and provide a concise read on it, and (more specifically) reading things back to me as we're finishing talking about a topic.”

– Rob, Associate Creative Director