2. Coaching modules

Introduction

Founding our companies, we approached each new challenge with the same 110% maximum effort we applied to be successful through other phases of our lives: prior jobs, academics, sport, etc. And that strategy served us well through the early days. But the dynamism, the speed of change in the role of the startup CEO, was so much faster than what we experienced anywhere else. One day you’re delivering an all-hands to five people, and that quickly becomes 100. Your largest shareholders shift from yourself and your co-founders, to Fortune 500 companies and VCs with 100x more experience than you. So suddenly you have to master public speaking and rethink your board meetings in what feels like a blink of an eye. This transformation applies nearly line by line across the CEOs job description over and over again as you scale.

Through this evolution as leaders, we came to the realization that in order to rise to these challenges, unlocking our highest performance and that of our teams, required more than just smarts and hard work. It required a conscious and continuous investment in ourselves to build stronger leadership skills, managerial skills and emotional resilience. And in hindsight it’s an investment that’s easily become the most impactful contribution we’ve made in moving ourselves forward and our businesses forward.

Below is our collection of Coaching modules. Each includes templates, frameworks, checklists and hard-won insights to accelerate your growth as CEO. The first half, on optimizing yourself, works through modules examining what your job really is, tactics to improve your output through greater self-awareness, opportunities to improve your physical, mental and emotional fitness, and how to leverage a trusted personal board. The second half, on optimizing your team, works through defining your management principles, building a growth-stage executive team, and creating broader organizational alignment across your company as you scale. Read it from top to bottom if you have time, it’s loosely organized that way, or choose your adventure based on what’s most timely for you and your business right now.

2.1 Your job

You may have read before that the founder CEO has has only three jobs: setting vision, recruiting, and fundraising. While we agree that those three are critical functions, it misses the point that the CEO is also responsible for literally everything else. The job is truly all encompassing. In this section we zoom in on a select few takeaways that we think really shouldn’t be overlooked.

2.2 Leveling up

Tactics to dial up your velocity, output and performance as a CEO. Our playbook to extract high performance starts with building greater self-awareness, creating a baseline for your own behavior, and using micro-experiments to transform how you problem solve and turn into a high-performing CEO.

2.3 Headspace

Personal fitness can be an asset or a liability in your pursuit of high performance as a CEO. You should think twice about which column you’re in, and consider tools to better manage your physical health, mental fortitude and emotional resilience.

2.4 Personal boards

This is not about your company board of directors. It’s about building the team of trusted voices that give you advice and feedback as you navigate the toughest decisions for your business. Why you need a personal board and how to maximize it’s value.

2.5 Management principles

Establishing a known and reliable framework for how you operate and how you expect your team to operate drives greater sync across your team and gives everyone a consistent set of rules to work with.

2.6 Your executive team

Building a high-functioning leadership group is a continual process. You will undoubtedly make some hiring mistakes along the way, and you will outgrow others. That’s normal. What’s important is to continually assess, take measured risks to fill talent gaps, and tightly align individual motivations and incentives with company goals every step of the way.

2.7 Leadership at scale

How to create a shared picture of what “good” looks like with your team, be an active manager that uses feedback to reset divergent expectations, and build alignment towards shared company goals.

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