📋Notes: A real coaching session (vol. 2)

Hi!

Many of you have asked me to share notes from real executive coaching sessions so you can understand what executive coaching looks like in practice.

I recently shared this (see here) and you wanted more! So here we go!

A recent coachee shared her concerns about GenAI and remote work making her and her role less relevant at her company. With her kind permission I'm sharing some summary notes from our coaching session.

We used the GROW coaching model to provide a structure for this conversation - you can refer to the model here.

Feel free to leave any comments or questions on the post and I'll respond with information where I can.

Thanks!
coachparin

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Context

• Late 30s Director level employee at a Big Tech company. Currently in a regional program manager role.

• She has had a really successful career at 3 Big Tech companies. Loves the work and believes in the vision of the current company.

• Recently however she has started to have some concerns about her role amidst ongoing layoffs

• “I see big tech companies increasingly looking to reduce costs by adopting GenAI and by locating some roles to lower cost locations. I am worried my role might be very easily replaced!”

Goal of Session

• “How do I stay relevant when GenAI and a remote worker could do so many parts of my program management role?”
  

Reality Today

• She is a very high performer with a stellar reputation in the company. She was reluctant to tell me this upfront but we were able to agree this was the reality after we talked about her career trajectory and some feedback from her colleagues.

• Her main responsibilities include a range of what she describes as “not fun” and “fun” responsibilities

• On the “not fun” side - she is responsible for pulling together business performance reports, managing budgets and procurement, creating status updates, making sure complex projects run smoothly, making sure deadlines get achieved. These are typically repeatable tasks that require one off process design and are then run on regular time intervals

• On the “fun” side - she has become a go to person to resolve conflicts and lack of alignment across business units. She has become a go to person when the company has tradeoffs and it requires someone to figure out a way forward. She enjoys this work because she likes playing a mediator role and she enjoys working with people more than working with process.

• She shared that she has observed a trend towards moving some program management roles and process roles to lower cost offshore locations. There is also a push across her company for people to use GenAI more. She has benefited from this training but is anticipating large parts of her role becoming more automated.

Obstacles and Options

• We tried to discover the source of her anxiety. I asked her which part of the change is most unsettling for her.

• She replied that she worries a large part of her role could in theory be 1. automated via GenAI or 2. moved offshore to a lower cost location

• However she also mentioned that these parts of the role are what she classified as in the “not fun” bucket.

• We talked about which aspects of her role are in the “fun” bucket and also likely of most value to the company. She replied that anything which required mediation and driving alignment between senior people could likely not be replicated. She has spent years building deep trusted relationships and people know her track record of helping people who previously could not work together to become great collaborators.

• We agreed to reframe her “fun and not fun” buckets to “low leverage and high leverage”

• We also agreed to think through what factors are in her control and which are not. Her conclusion was that Gen AI and remote work will continue to grow and this is out of her control. However her decision to embrace these trends and take advantage of them (rather than ignore or fear them) is in her control.

• I wanted to probe a bit deeper here to see what was behind the fears. She eventually revealed that she felt she was slow to embrace previous industry shifts to mobile and cloud earlier in her career as she had not realised how the tech industry changes quickly at that time. She promised herself that she would be more aware of signals of change after that.

• She also is acutely aware of layoffs in the tech industry and wants to make sure she remains relevant and in demand at all times.

What's next?

• She will audit her responsibilities into the “low leverage” and “high leverage” buckets

• For the low leverage bucket she will see where she can delegate the work to either GenAI tools or to more junior colleagues.

• For the high leverage work, she will aim to go deeper and get involved earlier in more high stakes situations where she can have an even greater impact for the company. She will try to help more people understand the value of her high EQ and where she can help solve specific people + process problems (and not just process problems)

• If everything goes well, she will spend much more of her time on higher leverage activities and be a beneficiary of the Gen AI + remote work trend.

• This outcome would represent a reframe for her → the trends she was initially fearful of will clear up some mindspace for her and propel her to the next stage in her career (more impact, more responsibilities)

• Final quote at end of session → “I now feel that this monkey on my back could actually be the wind in my sail!”