Executive coach Alisa Cohn
What’s the biggest shift you have to make when you become a manager?
Getting a promotion is a great accomplishment. Yet going from prized employee to team leader can often leave people feeling insecure. Suddenly you no longer have the same results to point to in order to demonstrate your value. Your value now comes from how well your team does, and that can be a difficult transition. How should new leaders approach their roles?
Alisa Cohn is an executive coach who works with startup founders, CEOs, and executive teams on topics like executive presence, influence and decision making. She contributes to Forbes, Worth, and was selected as one of the top 100 coaches in the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Project.
I recently interviewed Cohn for the LEADx Leadership Podcast, where she gave her best advice for new leaders, the common issues she sees as a coach, and the newest Marshall Goldsmith program. (The interview below has been lightly edited for space and clarity.)
Kevin Kruse: What would you tell someone who is making that move from individual contributor to a manager?
Alisa Cohn: It's such a rite of passage. First thing I would say is get ready. It's a humbling experience. Get ready to have been great at something and getting a lot of kudos for being great at something, and suddenly not being so great about it, being kinda awkward and all gangly arms, elbows, and knees. And then I would say that as an individual contributor, you are primed and you expect that all your achievement is going to come through your results. And that's normal.
As a manager you have to shift your mindset so that you have to realize that all your results, or a lot of your results are gonna come through the results of others. So your achievement is measured in the results of others. That is a big shift to make, and you think you're gonna be in charge and have all this power, and you’ve got no power. And as you get more senior, you're less connected to the work, and all you have is the ability to encourage, guide, coach, develop, and inspire others to their results. That is the sum total of your achievement and your result.
It's a very different mindset. And I guess I would add my best advice, which is the easiest way to make that mind shift is to fall in love with developing other people. And to recognize and fall in love with the fact that this is a learning journey for you. And think about it as a process and not as an outcome.
Kruse: What is the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches program?
Cohn: I've known Marshall for about 15 years. He's been a huge mentor for me and I've worked with him shoulder-to-shoulder in the trenches, so I've learned a lot from him. He decided about a year ago to create this legacy project of Marshall Goldsmith's 100 coaches. It's a pretty big deal. There've been 14,000 applicants, and so far he's selected about 60 of the coaches. For him, it’s really a ‘pay it forward’ project—he wants to select these 100 coaches, teach them everything he knows, for free, and then expect that in the future we all have this mandate to pay it forward to others.
Just being part of this community and this network of like-minded people who all want to give back, who want to learn at the creator of the modern day executive coaching, and also to build a community to support each other.
Kruse: What's the program been like?
Cohn: I think it's an evolving process, but so far what he's done is he's named a number of different weekends. They've been in New York, Boston, and Phoenix, and we just had one in London last weekend where he brings us all together. He often brings in his clients and colleagues, like Alan Mulally, the former CEO of Ford, Dr. Jim Kim, the president of the World Bank, and they share with us things they've learned from leadership along the way.
And then Marshall speaks also about his long career, how he's built up his brand, and also how he does what he does. He's very innovative and very clear, from the point of view that he gives everything away. He says, "You should use all of this, absolutely you should help each other, and I'm here to support you in doing what you want to do in using all this material to do what you want to do."
Kruse: What is something that you see a lot or that you like to teach when it comes to leadership?
Cohn: When you're a leader, you have to realize that your suggestions can come across as orders. You have to be very mindful about what you say and do, and how you come across, because when you're coming from the top, you feel like, 'Oh, I'm just me.' But in fact, you're very much the role of the CEO or the role of the leader.
The other thing I would say is that it's your mandate to make sure the pictures in your head are communicated to the pictures in everybody else's head, in the employees around you. And the way to do that—I'm sorry to say—is repetition, repetition, repetition. You cannot communicate too much. It's over-communicate until you're sick of it, and that's when they hear it. You can't just say, 'Oh, I told them that.' No, it's not just that 'I told them that,' it's also that you tell them that in one-on-ones, in small groups, in email, in person, in large groups. It's a way that you have to recognize that you're on-call to constantly be telling them the same message so they can see what you see.
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Your first time as a leader is guaranteed to have its tough (or awkward) moments. It’s important to start shifting your mindset as early as possible- you are now responsible for the results of many, and that signals that it’s time to let go of your own individual accomplishments. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to do well as a leader, quite the contrary. By focusing on the team and their development you are more likely to achieve winning results.