“A skill which has always been important but is becoming even more important possibly for CxOs is the clarity of decision making. It's important to clearly communicate what the decisions are, who made them, what are the consequences and where it's recorded.”

Intro:
Welcome to the Agile Digital Transformation podcast, where we explore different aspects of digital transformation and digital experience with your host Tim Butara, content and community manager at Agiledrop.

Tim Butara: Hello everyone, thanks for tuning in. Our guest today is Evgeny Schadchnev, executive coach and founder of Europe’s first developer bootcamp Makers. After stepping down as the CEO of Makers, Evgeny started focusing on executive coaching and he's been helping entrepreneurs and CxO roles grow and transform in the digital age. In today's episode, we'll be talking about how Covid and the rise of digital transformation have impacted executive coaching, both from the point of view of CxOs and coaches. 

Welcome, Evgeny, it's great to have you on the show today. Can you start off by telling us a bit more about yourself, so when and how did you decide to focus on executive coaching and in particular helping startup CEOs?

Evgeny Shadchnev: Tim, thank you for having me. I started Makers, the coding bootcamp that you mentioned in 2015 and over most of the last eight years, I led it as a founder and CEO before stepping down last year. During my time as a founder and the CEO, I worked with several executive coaches. I benefited tremendously from their support and their guidance, I learned a lot in the process. So, when I decided to step down as a CEO and choose the next step of my career, executive coaching was one of the most natural transitions. So, I stepped down last year and retrained as an executive coach and I’ve been helping other founders and CEOs since.

Tim Butara: So, this is a pretty new endeavor actually and a really unique timing if I can put it like that. You know, obviously, you started out almost at exactly the same time as the Covid pandemic hit, but that's a question for a little bit later. Can you first tell us about the top trends that you were seeing in executive coaching before the pandemic, so before 2020?

Evgeny Shadchnev: So, before Covid hit, coaching was becoming a more and more popular topic in the entrepreneurial community that I’m a part of. I noticed that more founders are finding coaching helpful,  more and more are interested in trying coaching and this just became a more prominent topic. But I also noticed that among those who were going to work with the coach or the coaches that were guiding other founders, there was a noticeable shift away from just focusing on performance which is how coaching is sometimes seen and maybe used to be seen in the past, towards a deeper focus on self-inquiry and self-awareness.

Of course, the two topics are closely related but I think coaching has been evolving from just focusing on moving numbers up into the right, increasing the performance in the most obvious and objective terms, away from that and towards understanding of who you really are as a founder and the CEO, how your background and your upbringing influences you show up for work, in the boardroom, and what does it mean for the teams that you lead. This development also led to another shift which I noticed in the last few years; more and more people in the entrepreneurial community and in the coaching community as well are comfortable bringing spirituality into coaching.

It may sound like these two topics have nothing to do with each other and maybe 20 years ago it would be unnatural but today, I noticed more and more founders reading books like The Power of Now and A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle and others, trying to figure out what meditation can teach them that can be applicable in the boardroom. And in this topic, which I loosely named it spirituality which is of course huge, is drifting closer to coaching and is becoming more accepted in the entrepreneurial community and in the coaching community.

Tim Butara: That's a really great observation and very good point. I’ve actually been noticing a lot of coaching and leadership related content that's veering a lot into the type of content that you mentioned that you dub spirit spirituality. And it makes sense actually because, work is becoming an inseparable part of our lives especially now with Covid and with the lines between work and free time blurred, and you know it only makes perfect sense, that something that's basically so intrinsic to the human experience as spirituality would start to be more and more connected to the time we spend at work also.

Evgeny Shadchnev: And of course, there are obvious pitfalls because when coaches pretend that they are spiritual teachers and start teaching fundamental truths of existence that process can easily go awry, let's put it this way. But as long as coaches understand where the line is between actual coaching and therapy, spirituality, counseling and so on, everything is okay.

Tim Butara: Yeah, that's an important caveat right there. So, now let's move on to the next period, so the time after Covid hit. How did things shift when Covid hit and the lockdowns hit and the mass digit transformation started?

Evgeny Shadchnev: I think by now the main lesson will not be surprising to anyone. Everyone thought that it would be a huge change and it was, but also by now it's fair to say that a lot of people, coaches among them, adapted to working remotely and learned that it's possible to do high-quality work remotely. I must admit that about seven years ago, I chose not to work with a coach because, he's an incredible coach probably the best I’ve ever met, but he was only available to work remotely and in my naiveté, I thought, ‘well if my company is paying lots of money for coaching, I really want to see someone face to face because doing it on Skype or whatever was available seven years ago, would not be the same experience.’ Now I know again from experience as a client and as a coach, that this is simply not true. It's absolutely possible to do high quality work remotely and this applies not just to coaching but to so many other professions and coaching is just among them.

Tim Butara: So, one of the big changes you've been seeing and others in the field have been seeing is the move to more remote and virtual coaching if I understand it correctly? 

Evgeny Shadchnev: Yes, more and more coaches are realizing that it's possible to work remotely which also shifts how they are working because, if you are working face to face with a client and you are meeting a client let's say at their office, you can see maybe two, maybe three people a day in London. Whereas, if you're working remotely, you can be far more creative with your schedule and this works both ways. A lot of clients discover that once everything shifts online, they can use their schedule much more efficiently. And on a side note, I also suspect that this down the line will have a positive impact on pricing, at least positive from their client’s point of view. Because, as remote work is making scheduling more efficient, the coaching services on average across the industry might well become less expensive, purely as the result of this shift.

Tim Butara: Yeah, that's another good point, right. That's another trend that we've been seeing in a lot of areas that are now moving online which previously involved a lot of costs or high fees, which can now be partly done away with or reduced because of this move to online, because of the efficiency, because of the flexibility and everything being at your disposal, basically. You know you can have a coaching session while you're having a coffee in a bar or... okay, maybe not while you're cooking lunch, but you know what I mean.

Evgeny Shadchnev: Yeah, well it's definitely possible to be more flexible. As a result, some coaches including myself chose to work only remotely. For example, by moving away from London to live in a quieter and sunnier place while still working with the clients who are mostly based in London.

Tim Butara: So, what has your experience been like now with remote coaching? Are there any things that really stood out to you? Any major challenges or obstacles or something like that?

Evgeny Shadchnev: One of the obvious challenges is of course that you don't see the entire body of the person. So, a lot of coaching relies on being connected to the other person by seeing and feeling connected to their bodies, understanding their body language. And truth be told, the screen is 13 or 15 or 20 even 27 inches, it’s not the same as being face to face with someone. Also, when working with the clients face to face, it's easier to use the entire space by moving around the room or going for a walk together for example, or trying some creative techniques when for example, we can play together using some objects on the table. So, all of this takes different forms, if we're working remotely. But different doesn't mean worse or inferior in any way. I see it as an evolution, as the next step forward. And just like online shopping is not inferior to real shopping on a high street, it's just different. Coaching is evolving in the same way, and some things which maybe were difficult face to face are becoming much easier online. So, it's a change, it's an evolution. I don't see it in terms of good or bad, it's just a shift.

Tim Butara: Yeah, very well said. Okay this was a pretty obvious trend because the move to remote work and to virtual or video communication has been pretty much a worldwide trend. But were there any digital trends that were less obvious or maybe more specific to the coaching industry that Covid has introduced?

Evgeny Shadchnev: I think one other thing which is specific to the coaching industry which most clients will never know about is that all coaching training also inevitably shifted online. Whereas, just a few years ago, I think it would be difficult to mention that people would train and qualify as a coach without another coach observing them and giving feedback to them face to face and it turned out that it also works pretty well. Coaching schools adapted, shifted to Zoom, tried and learned new techniques and the entire industry is moving forward without too many challenges. 

But companies are affected far more than coaches. Mostly because, well, coaches often work as individual practitioners, whereas companies are teams of professionals. And when you move the entire team from working on site to working completely remotely, as we've done at Makers and just like almost every company I was forced to do, a lot of things need to evolve starting with the clarity of communication and many other things.

Tim Butara: Oh, yeah, there are a lot more moving parts so a lot more has to be done on the organizational side to kind of keep everything afloat and working as it was before. Yeah. Okay, so, taking into account all that we've talked about so far, are there any new skills that CxOs should have if they want to thrive in a post Covid era as opposed to pre-Covid? 

Evgeny Shadchnev: Yes, I think so. There will be some new skills and there will be a change in some of the existing skills. So, I think the CxOs in the post-Covid world will need to be far more deliberate and clearer when it comes to their communication. In the office, a lot of communication happens implicitly or unintentionally or in small conversations. In my time as a CEO, I could literally do something like raising my hand in the middle of the office and say, ‘hello everyone, can I at least have 20 seconds of your attention?’ And you can do it when you are physically in the same space. When you are working remotely, communication needs to be far more careful and deliberate purely because, it's easy to miss things especially if the main communication platform is something like Slack, which is just an ongoing stream of information. 

Another skill that CxOs will certainly need post-Covid is learning how to empathize with their teams in a more deliberate way. Again, we are so used to building human connections face to face and when we are in the office, it's all those small things like saying hello and having a quick chat near the water cooler or maybe going for a coffee without any agenda or just having a conversation about what was the weather last weekend, all those things matter to tune into the emotional state of each other and get a feel of how the entire team is working. All of this needs to be done deliberately if people are working remotely. This is particularly important which is a segue to my third point when it comes to supporting juniors.

People who have been around for 10 or 20 years to build their skills, networks and careers working pre-Covid, they have a far easier time transitioning to a remote only or hybrid world than people who are just entering the industry. If you've never worked in a company and your first experience is opening the laptop after university and seeing Slack, Notion, JIRA, Asana and 20 other systems, it will be an overwhelming and confusing experience. So, companies need to support juniors far more than they did in the past because in the past you could hire a junior, say, ‘hey sit between those two experienced, let's say engineers and just observe them working, ask them questions and learn how the company works.’ Each junior works for most of the company for most of the time before Covid. Today onboarding juniors should be a far more deliberate task, otherwise they will just not be onboarded well.

A couple of other things I wanted to mention is that, a skill which has always been important but is becoming even more important possibly for CxOs is the clarity of decision making. It's important to clearly communicate what the decisions are, who made them, what are the consequences and where it's recorded. In the offline world, it's always been important but you could get this information by informally talking to each other in the office. If everything happens online, no one really knows about the decision that was taken unless there is a written record somewhere in the form of a document which says, ‘this was the decision, this is what happened, this is who made it and these are the consequences.’ And people leading the company should really lead by example and make sure that they are working.

And the work of CxOs is well mostly making decisions, they need to make sure that all this is clearly documented and communicated. Which also makes me think of yet another skill, written communication which, again, has always been important but before Covid, some people relied more on the strength of their charisma and their spoken communication skills. Post-Covid, written communication skills are becoming just a little bit more important. And finally, because Tim, I need to stop somewhere with this list, so I’ll mention one last thing here. Finally, I think it will be quite important for CxOs to learn to empathize with their teams when it comes to work-life balance. 

Before Covid, we spent most of our time, at least Monday to Friday in the office and our focus was on the office-based work. Whereas, right now if we're working remotely, it's a combination of child care, Amazon deliveries, going for a run at lunchtime and all those things which were never part of the picture before Covid. And today, it still means that people are working full-time, people are working remotely, but how exactly it's done becomes different. So, if let's say you're a CxO and you don't have children, your experience working remotely will be quite different from the experience of someone who's got two five-year-olds at home. So, extra effort to build some empathy with your teams and understand everyone's different situation. Someone can be living in a house alone and someone can be living in a flat shared with two other people on a completely different schedule. All these details will matter in order to really understand how your team works, what drives them and ultimately how to build a successful company.

Tim Butara: So, it’s really a lot of focus on people skills or a lot of people-centered skills and most of them involve some kind of communication, right? Even the one that’s least like the other ones, so decision making, you mentioned that the most important part that's changed about decision making is how you communicate how decisions are made to the whole team basically. Okay yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Do you think these trends that we've discussed so far, so both the technology transformations or the changes in trends and the redefined skills for CxO roles, do you think these trends will continue to be dominant or will there be any new ones that will have an even greater impact on the industry; what are your predictions? 

Evgeny Shadchnev: I can't really tell the future, but I do expect these trends to be what we've been discussing to stay. Flexibility of work is here to stay. Once we learn as an industry society as a world that it's possible to do high quality work remotely, in a hybrid or remote only fashion, it's impossible to go back and pretend that we can only be productive if we are sitting in front of our computer on the 33rd floor in the City of London. So, I expect this flexibility and the hybrid way of working to stay. One particular thing which I think business leaders need to pay attention to, is to start thinking carefully about the return on investment of their real estate.

In the past the cost of the office was always or often taken for granted because, well, every company has an office, it's an inevitable cost of course it needs to be reasonable, but it was taken as a given. Whereas today, companies that figure out how to do what you are doing but without having the direct and indirect costs of having their own real estate. We'll have just an extra percentage point on their profit margin. In particular, I will not be surprised to see private equity firms engaging in a new kind of activity - buying firms which are okay but they are operating in a hybrid or office first way, and then spending a couple of years, shifting them completely to your remote first world and gaining an extra few percentage points and therefore valuation increase as a result of the shift to a remote on the world and then reselling the company. I don't think we've seen it before but I fully expect the private equity world to see a real estate cost as something to be optimized away. So, my message to CxOs and business leaders is to really be clear what is the return on investment of your office costs.

Tim Butara: Do you have any other top tips for executives and business leaders that are having trouble maybe with keeping up with all of this and implementing the lessons that they learn through coaching, or maybe they don't even know how to get the right coaching? 

Evgeny Shadchnev: Yes, although I will not say anything new that I wouldn’t have said one, two or three years ago. Maybe the most important one is, take time to reflect, especially if you feel overwhelmed. There is an old joke which is only half joke that if you don't have time to meditate for an hour, you need to meditate for two hours. If you feel overwhelmed it's a sign that you need to slow down because chances are you're not as efficient as you think you are or as you need to be. So, taking time to reflect, whatever this means whether it's meditation, journaling or just quiet time in nature, is really helpful and scheduling it is a really a good idea because it will not happen by itself unless you've got a strong established habit.

Another tip which I’ve already mentioned I’ll just reiterate because it's so important is, stay in close contact with your people. In the office face-to-face, it's easier to speak or at least see most people in the office on any given day or week, whereas remotely, unless you make an explicit effort to reach out and build or maintain a connection to someone, you will not have any opportunity to interact with them unless you choose to. So, these are probably my two top tips that I would give to CxOs going forward.

Tim Butara: They make a lot of sense, right, it's basically just two sides of the same coin. So, one, we have to stay in close connection with yourself, and two, stay in close connection with your team. 

Evgeny Shadchnev: Yep, that’s more or less it. It's all about having the skills to really understand what's going on both inside yourself and outside yourself, that is in your company, in your team.

Tim Butara: Awesome, that's a great note to finish on. Thank you so much Evgeny for being our guest today. It was a real pleasure and it’s been a fascinating conversation. I really enjoyed this. Maybe, more unique take, more people-focused on the topics that we have on our podcast. So, yeah, thank you for being our guest again.

Evgeny Shadchnev: Thank you Tim.

Tim Butara: Just before we finish, if our listeners want to reach out to you or learn more about you or maybe even get coaching info or coaching help, where can they reach out to you?

Evgeny Shadchnev: They can learn more about me on my website which is evgeny.coach, so, basically my first name dot coach.

Tim Butara: Awesome, I’ll link that in the show notes and yeah, thanks again Evgeny. And to our listeners: that's all for this episode. Have a great day, everyone, and stay safe.

Outro:
Thanks for tuning in. If you'd like to check out other episodes, you can find all of them at agiledrop.com/podcast, as well as on all the most popular podcasting platforms.

Make sure to subscribe so you don't miss any new episodes, and don't forget to share the podcast with your friends and colleagues.