You might not enjoy my process, but you will love the results.
A trip down audacious leadership development lane
Sitting in the boardroom, light pours into the large bay windows as I wait for my clients to arrive for their last executive leadership MASTERMIND after working together for close to two years. As I wait patiently for all six company founders and their People Operations consultant, I struggle with the edge I am approaching, my lower belly tightening.
Before every session, I ponder, “Am I taking it too far this time? Is this exercise going to take them over the edge?”. I plan to take them through the biology of orgasms and the magic of human embryo creation, and compare it to how they function as leaders in their business.”
As I go through my presentation and facilitated conversation within the group, I internalize what I think to be their inner thoughts. “Where the hell is she going with this?”
Each month, inch by inch, I engage the all-male executive team to go deeper into their inner wisdom and intimacy as individual leaders and as a collective team. I like to push their edges, and I invite them to be fully alive lovers, friends, business executives, and leaders. There has to be a world where all of those attributes can exist together rather than being mutually exclusive.
It all started when I was introduced to the COO, *Chris, at SOHO House West Hollywood, just six months after landing in LA with no connections in the music industry.
Young, tattooed, and bright-eyed with potential, he shared the company’s org chart and the company website, which was an amusement park ride in itself, taking me into another orbit of creativity unleashed.
“We could use your help. We’ve built an impressive portfolio of client work, we have a great website, but we’ve no idea how to run a company. We all have titles, but we couldn’t tell you with clarity what each of us does,” shared Chris.
I was impressed with his transparency and openness to being coached. We agreed to schedule a meeting with the rest of their executive team to determine the best way forward.
I had no idea what I was getting into. As an Executive Leadership Coach, I have exclusively worked with individual founders and created my own superpower MASTERMIND group coaching cohorts of extremely ambitious founders and senior executives. This was going to be a new experience that I had been craving since starting my business in April 2020, when the world shut down due to COVID.
Now, most founding teams have an average of two to three founders running the company, with most having only two. This team was unique in that all six founders had equal voting rights and ran the business together without a CEO at the helm. While experiencing a lot of challenges in their first four years, including a pandemic that wiped out live music touring, their prime business, they still managed to build a ten-million-dollar-grossing company with no debt and no outside investment. I was impressed and excited by their potential.
Each founder trickles in one by one, and I can feel their annoyance at the endless mound of tasks awaiting them back at their desk while they are required to take a sacred five-hour pause. They know that the constant stream of incoming texts and project work will have to wait, as their phones go into airplane mode and each one is asked to identify their feelings, work through conflicts, and focus on the creative process as we dream up inspired action as a team.
As my inner facilitator comes out to play, I further downregulate, allowing my inner guide to tap into the energy of the group and craft words for each founder individually and as a collective to bring out the safety of their full selves.
“You might not enjoy the process, but you will love the results,” I tell clients as they step into my process.
Each executive practices the importance of being visible, sharing intimately, and creating collective deep trust in one another and the team. They are invited to write letters to themselves from fear, love, or shame and share their letters with the group in the boardroom. The collective intimidation and sharing naturally evolve each one of them to go deeper and be able to hold more of each other while navigating conflict quickly outside of the boardroom.
Like a piece of classical music, we move into the friction of finance. I have learned that when it comes to finance and creatives, a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.
I am direct with the CFO, “We cannot show them a P&L report. We will lose them. Take the P&L and create a story with the numbers. Make it fun and allow the team to get gradually more comfortable with building their financial acumen. Consider this your TEDx Talk every time we meet and knock it out of the park”.
Evan* understood the assignment. Month after month, each founder began asking better questions, was able to dive deeper into the numbers, and enjoyed the anticipation of building a roadmap to their big, hairy, audacious goals, especially when the bottom-line revenue doubled a year after we started this process.
This is my sweet spot, my creative force. Getting underneath the surface to go even deeper individually and as a collective, while providing safety and security for everyone in the boardroom to scale their communication and vulnerability, which yields results and less bullshit.
I walk out of my client’s office and feel into how the relationship has evolved. Warm gratitude fills my body as I approach my car and bid farewell to the intentional work we have done together. We climbed Mount Everest, bruises and all, and arrived back at base camp to bid farewell as we embark on new adventures in different directions yet stay connected.
I am so proud of the work I have been called to do. It might not be for everyone, but it’s the perfect match for audacious leaders looking to come fully alive.
If you are an entrepreneurial or artist team looking for a leadership development experience that brings your team alive and living on the edges of their growth at all times, I would love to connect.
*Names have been changed to protect anonymity.