Transition with me, Step by Step - Day 04

Making Sense of the Information

One of the hard things about discovery mode is that you can easily get lost in it. You have conversations that give you new ideas, you gather a lot of opinions and conflicting information, and sometimes you completely forget what you were trying to get out of it in the first place. The purpose of information interviewing is to find out how other people have successfully done the things you think you want to do. This is part of “external discovery”, and your goal is to find out:

1. Do I really want to do this? Does it sound like as good of a fit as I imagined it might be, and if not, are their similar options that could be a better fit?
2. If it is, in fact, something I’d like to do, how have other people done this, and from all their paths, can I see a path that I could take to achieve this goal?

You continue to information interview until you’ve found a good fit and a good path.

What I learned from my information interviews (yes, I finally did them), was that there are some ways that people do corporate coaching that don’t feel like a good fit for me, but each person I talked to had some new insight to share that helped me see how easy it would be to do coaching in the corporate arena the way I like to coach.

One of the most important things you can learn from information interviewing is the many different paths to success. This keeps you out of the trap of following the “standard road” to success, which may not fit you. The secret is to ask people to tell their story, especially if it seems to be an exception, or otherwise different from the standard approach. What I learned was:

1. Almost every coach in corporate leadership roles built their business by referral only – not by marketing to Human Resources departments. However, one business coach filled his practice with an 18 month direct mail program. He was moving across the country and didn’t have the luxury of an established network, so he tried something different, and it worked.
2. Standard thinking is that most executive / corporate coaches work on site, but one person I talked to built a corporate practice exclusively on the telephone, and had also been the happy recipient of this type of coaching when she was an executive. She was confident and comfortable with this model, and rarely got push back. Clients expect that you, as a professional, know best how to approach your work. They are looking for results.
3. I was worried about writing up a complicated corporate contract, but two successful coaches I talked with preferred to use simple 1-2 page agreements, which gave me the confidence to use my current agreement and only make a few minor adjustments.

Usually I recommend that you hear at least five different stories, and each of those five perspectives becomes a “data point”. The more data points, the more perspective, and the better feel you have for the environment that you want to enter.

The most important things I got from my conversations were: (1) a clearer picture of myself in the role I want, and (2) some good ideas about the approach I could use to successfully move into this role. Since, I have answered both questions, it’s time to move OUT of the external discovery phase onto the next step.