Is Coaching Useful for a CTO?

Last year, I enrolled in a coaching course. I decided to do this after realizing that my work as a Fractional CTO involved a lot of mentoring, helping engineers transform into managers and CTOs, and helping teams improve their way of working. Although I feel that my mentoring style has generally been effective, I have noticed that it hasn’t always worked with some people and teams. At the same time, several people in my circle told me about coaching and how it had helped them professionally in working with teams and individuals. For all these reasons, I decided to enroll in a course with the expectation of improving my skills in these areas, but what I didn’t imagine was that coaching would bring me more than I expected and help me rethink my style as a CTO.

For the first time in my life, I studied aspects of psychology and neuroscience. I learned about people’s motivations and the limiting beliefs that prevent them from achieving things they are perfectly capable of. I also studied how to ask questions, how to listen, and how to carry out personal development processes and achieve goals. Throughout the course, it was constantly clear how what I was studying had direct application to the work of a leader. I found many answers and explanations as to why my way of handling certain responsibilities had not been fruitful. I realized that I frequently abused a too directive style and that when I communicated, I focused too much on the “what” and not so much on the “how,” among many other things.

Talking about everything I have learned would make this post too long, so I will try to summarize some of the main ideas that I believe are very useful for a leader, such as a CTO:

1. The question is an extremely powerful tool but frequently undervalued tool in a leader’s skill set. In coaching, it is the coach’s main tool, capable of conducting processes almost entirely through questions. When a leader asks open and complex questions, it gives the team the opportunity to think and take a leading role in finding solutions. This allows people to become more involved and feel ownership of the project. And this changes the culture of a company. In contrast, we can think of leaders who have all the answers and tell their team exactly what to do in great detail. This would be a directive style. Personally, I believe that the choice between one style and another is not a dichotomous choice, but depends on the circumstances. However, I think that questions still occupy a secondary place in many leaders’ repertoires, which represents a missed opportunity to be better leaders and have better organizations.

2. Defining clear, relevant, and motivating goals is a fundamental first step when working on projects, with teams, and with individuals. These goals allow us to define a clear destination to move towards and check our progress. In coaching, different techniques are studied to define goals, such as SMART, PURE, and CLEAR, which are very widespread techniques. However, perhaps the most important thing I have learned is that defining the goal is a process in itself. When working with people, it is common for them not to be clear about what they want or what achieving the goal really means for them. The first step is to help the person truly understand what they want and how that goal connects with their deeper motivations (the why). For example, a person might enter a coaching process with the desire to develop the habit of exercising every morning, but without stopping to reflect on the significance of that for them. The coach will help them think and ask themselves why they want that. For example, a possible answer might be: that exercising in the morning will allow me to feel that I have a healthier life, be more relaxed during the day, manage my anxiety better, improve how I relate to my colleagues and family, and find calm and stability in my life.

3. Habits define an important part of our behavior as individuals, teams, and organizations. At an individual level, someone might have the habit of taking notes in meetings, listening to their colleagues or interrupting them, being punctual or late, reading documentation, testing the software they develop, etc. It is common for a manager to promote good practices in the team, usually through a meeting to explain them and providing the necessary resources for the team to adopt them. However, it is common for the level of adoption in the team to be uneven, with some lagging behind and resisting adopting the new practice, not forming the habit. In coaching, habits and how to help adopt them are studied. Habit formation is not just a matter of discipline and consistency; factors such as the environment and the way they are adopted are also crucial. It is very common for a leader to ask their team to change a habit without reflecting on whether the conditions for adopting that habit are in place. I have learned that there are certain techniques to facilitate habits, such as making the habit we want to form easy and making the habit we want to eradicate difficult, specifying the time and place, or finding the motivations for change. A common example of preparing the environment can be seen in companies that redesign their offices to improve communication within and between teams. Changes like remote work have also led to the reconfiguration of many habits. For instance, I have seen how written documentation has naturally increased or how pair programming has become easier.

4. There is great untapped potential in people, and unlocking it is easier than we think if we know how to do it. We have all experienced trying to change someone by telling them what we think they should do and failing. We have also seen someone and thought they could improve if they believed more in their worth or abandoned certain limiting beliefs. Too often, managers use techniques from their private lives to deal with people, without success. However, coaching focuses on how to help people change and has developed many tools and methodologies for this purpose, such as the GROW model, where questions are used to define goals, understand the reality and beliefs that limit the person, explore different options, and define an action plan to achieve those goals. But the most important thing for me is being able to put this into practice with people in real processes and see how results are obtained. This has made me realize that people have the capacity to change, even if it is sometimes undervalued and questioned. I think we should ask ourselves if the real problem has more to do with the leaders’ ability to motivate and facilitate change processes to help people realize their potential.

Although we live in the age of AI, people are still the driving force of organizations and are likely to remain so for years. I do think that thanks to AI, the level of automation will significantly increase, and people will be freed from many repetitive low-level tasks, having to focus on using our more human capacities, which are difficult to replicate by AI. In the future, not realizing our potential may no longer be an option. This is why we need leaders capable of helping people realize that potential, and these leaders need tools to achieve it. I believe that coaching can be a very powerful tool for them.

Personally, I would have liked to have taken the course a few years ago; I think it would have allowed me to lead differently and avoid some of the mistakes I have made. Even so, I am happy because that previous experience has helped me better understand coaching and many of the reasons why. Today, I can say that coaching has influenced both my way of approaching the process of helping new managers and the way I work with technology teams. I feel that I have acquired tools to carry out accompaniment and professional growth processes with a higher probability of success.

If you find yourself in a position of responsibility and feel that you are not able to bring out the best in people, my recommendation is to ask yourself if tools like coaching can help you.

I am currently working to help companies and technology teams make better use of their potential. I help them to be aware of where their inefficiencies lie and how they can work on concrete actions to improve within their context, and do so on an ongoing basis. If you feel that you have room for improvement in your company, but the day-to-day is eating you up, we can talk to explore solutions together. Book a call here.