Jason Gore, CEO and Executive Coach; Bryan Neuberg, Managing Partner and Executive CoachIn an interview with Manage HR, Jason Gore, CEO, and Bryan Neuberg, Managing Partner of Neuberg Gore, explain how they guide startup CEOs and execs to navigate challenges and become great leaders.
How do you help cultivate startup leaders?
Neuberg: Working with startup CEOs and execs is dynamic and fast-paced. We understand how to help them navigate pivotal moments and scale with their companies.
CEOs are fighting for the survival of their companies while building their teams, figuring out their roles, and driving their initiatives forward. It’s impossible for them to do it all well. It’s a practice of extraordinary prioritization–choosing which fires to let burn and which to address. We are inspired by helping them get that balance right.
Gore: I spent many years trying to define good leadership. Ultimately, we created a toolset called the Saturn Leadership Index, which is a set of 51 behaviors based on our research of hundreds of startup leaders. It helps leaders identify their blind spots. Simply put, when leaders don’t do these behaviors, it usually diminishes the results their teams achieve.
Most of our coaching programs begin with a 360-degree assessment based on the Saturn leadership index. It collects feedback from their peers, team members, and their board members when appropriate.
For many of our clients, the 360 report is incredibly useful. It clearly articulates their strengths and improvement opportunities– specific ways they are losing their teams’ trust and specific behaviors to lead more effectively. Most founders walk away with a clear picture of their blindspots and, more importantly, a clear set of next steps to be better leaders and reach their goals.
Once leaders grasp what good leadership can look like, they usually change fast. Of course, I have to keep everything strictly confidential, but the changes the leader makes are usually quick and quite apparent.
Sometimes, leaders do get stuck in patterns that aren’t working even after getting feedback. When this happens, our coaches combine psychological depth with action-oriented rigor to help them shift unproductive mindsets.
Six months into a program, we often conduct a second leadership assessment to quantify the changes a leader has achieved. It enables them to see the positive impact of new patterns and identify further behavioral shifts that can further drive team productivity.
Is this therapy for founders?
Neuberg: Definitely not. Most of our clients need to generate immediate results: up-level themselves, build their teams, create results, get funding, and repeat. That’s a big change from what’s needed in a startup’s disruptive early days. Successfully managing the transition to a high-growth company can mean the difference between a fire sale and successfully closing the next round of funding.
Our coaching and leadership tools help leaders identify their blindspots, acquire new skills, track their progress, and continually improve themselves and their teams.
Our coaches work with startup leaders in four key areas:
1. Leadership Development
2. Thought Partnership
3. Crises & Challenging Conversations
4. Mindset Shifts
Our approach is structured so that we can hold leaders accountable but also flexible to address the most important challenges they face day-to-day.
How do you help leaders navigate conflict?
Gore: CEOs spend most of their time in meetings–either 1:1 or with groups. Leadership ultimately shows up in how they communicate. When conversations go poorly, the consequences can be severe–from a lack of buy-in to a key executive quitting.
We give leaders a map for how to skillfully navigate conflict. This survival guide was created to boil down complex conversations into a practical, easy-to-use method that helps leaders avoid the most common mistakes. Most of our clients use specific survival guides for negotiations, delivering bad news, and other tough situations until the approach becomes intuitive.
Most founders walk away with a clear picture of their blindspots and, more importantly, a clear set of next steps to be better leaders and reach their goals
Neuberg: Many leaders don’t know how to give negative feedback or hold their people accountable. Why are certain team members failing to meet their goals? Do they need more resources? Or maybe they aren’t scaling up.
When an average exec is replaced with a high-performing exec, the CEO gets their first glimpse of what “great looks like.”
A lot of our coaching focuses on helping leaders have direct conversations that produce results. When leaders effectively hold team members accountable, they accelerate getting the right people in the right role. To get the whole team to give feedback and navigate conflict effectively, we help companies hire a full-time embedded coach. They coach team members across the organization and help build high-performance cultures.
How do leaders pick a coach?
Gore: We meet with each leader to understand their needs and introduce them to a coach we believe will be a great match. Then they have a complimentary coaching session. In my opinion, you’ve found a match when there is great chemistry, and the coaching session provided immediate value. Coaching needs to address leaders’ most burning issues and help them grow for longterm success.
Neuberg: We are a team of 15 coaches. It’s taken a decade to find and build the team. Although we continually learn from each other, we each have a distinct personality and expertise in specific aspects of the startup world. We work hard to ensure the leader gets the coach who will be the best fit–from our team or another firm. We simply want them to find a great coach that can help them achieve results.
Each one of us has a unique breadth of experience (e.g. negotiations, leadership, communication, culture) and each one of us has a fair degree of psychological training. This helps our clients get “unstuck” and achieve breakthroughs. Conflict-avoidant leaders become direct, people who are too direct become tactful, and competitive leaders start collaborating. A great coach can help create great results, and that’s the kind of relationship we want to build.
Can you give us a client story?
Gore: One of our CEO clients is a young aeronautics engineer who invented a technology that holds promise to change the space industry. He’s a brilliant engineer who suddenly found himself leading a team of 75 with no prior management experience. The team was continuously missing goals, he was constantly jumping in to solve problems, and everyone was exhausted from the firefighting.
A year later, he shared that his coach successfully helped him step into the CEO role, understand how to make decisions, and learn how to lead. He started seeing things through other people’s lenses and learned how to communicate the company strategy to the board, team, and organization.
Although there were still hiccups and many challenges ahead, his team started to collaborate well, make decisions faster, and execute more effectively. Situations that used to erupt into conflict now felt more like joint problemsolving. They also had more alignment, negotiated deadlines effectively, and were hitting their milestones. Perhaps most importantly, they were able to close the next round of funding.
How can people access these tools?
We believe that everyone should have the resources to grow as leaders. All of our tools, including the CUBE for Conflict and our leadership self-assessment, are free on our website (www.NeubergGore.com.)
