Why Invest in Leadership Coaching with Christine Tao, Sounding Board

In this HRchat we consider why the time for leadership coaching is now. 

Bill's guest this time is Christine Tao, co-founder & CEO at Sounding Board, a fast-growing scalable leadership development platform, combining technology and coaches to drive business impact for global enterprises.  

Christine's rapid career growth in Silicon Valley at Google and various startups inspired her to co-found Sounding Board with Lori Mazan, her executive coach. She has scaled hyper-growth startups to over $100M in revenue. Sounding Board is backed by leading investors like Bloomberg Beta and Precursor, and one of <3% of female-founded companies to raise venture capital.

Sounding Board is a cloud-based coaching platform and managed network of leadership coaches that makes leadership development scalable and measurable. 

Customers include leading enterprises such as Cloudera and Kraft Heinz as well as hyper growth startups like Chime, Bill.com, UserTesting and Klarna.




We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast, and Iceni Media Inc.  

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the HR chat podcast, bringing the best of the HR talent and leadership communities to you for more episodes and the latest articles covering what's new in the world of work, visit HR gazette.com subscribe and follow us on social media.

Speaker 2: 0:22

Welcome to another episode of the HR chat show. I'm your host today, bill Badham and in this HR chat, we're gonna consider why the time for leadership coaching is now listeners. My guest this time is Christine TA co-founder and CEO over at sounding board, a fast growing scalable leadership platform, combining technology and coaches to drive business impact for global enterprises. Christine's rapid career growth in Silicon valley at Google and various startups inspired her to co-found sounding board with Laurie Mazen, her executive coach. She has scaled hyper growth startups to over the 100 million in revenue and sounding board is backed by leading investors like Bloomberg beta and precursor, and is one of less than 3% of female founded companies to raise venture capital. Wow. Like I can speak sounding board is a cloud-based coaching platform and manage network of leadership coaches that leadership development, scalable and measurable and customers include leading enterprises, such as Cloudera craft Heines as well as hyper growth startups like chime bill.com. Love that name, bill.com uh, user testing and Klon app. Christine, welcome to the show today.

Speaker 3: 1:40

Thank you so much for having me bill.

Speaker 2: 1:43

So beyond my reintroduction there, Christine, why don't you start there? Why don't you take a minute or two and introduce yourself and at a very high level, cause we will get into it today. Tell us a bit about sounding board.

Speaker 3: 1:53

Yeah, well you, uh, captured our founding story pretty well. Um, you know, like you'd said, I've spent a lot of time here at different tech startups and law, large companies like Google in the bay area where I'm based. Um, but you know, sounding board really was born out of my experience in working with Lori, who was my coach at my last startup. And Lori has been a executive coach to public and private company CEOs for the last 25 years. I think she was one of the first of 300 even certified in the profession. And so with my experience scaling up startups and with her experience coaching at the highest levels, one of the things that we really felt was that this was such an effective leadership model, that if you really put technology at the forefront of that, that there was a real opportunity to bring this model down into an organization at the earliest stages of a leader's career, not just when they'd finally made it to the executive suite. So that really is the inspiration for sounding board. And, you know, the last few years have been an incredible journey. We've raised now almost 50 million to date. Our last round was led by jazz ventures. And a lot of that, I think points to just the macro trends that, that we see around hybrid remote work, the need for scalable technology driven solutions, but also I think this desire for much deeper personalization impact and a more hum human model really around development, especially when you think about out leadership skills, which really require committed time, you know, length your engagements to really drive the change in mindsets and behaviors. So yeah, excited for us to have a conversation today and, and thank you for letting me share a bit of our story.

Speaker 2: 3:57

Thank you. Thank you too, for saying as a human model, but not saying that you guys are trying to put the human in human resources, which I hear far too often,<laugh> on, on this show and it makes me cringe every time. Um, okay. So, um, my understanding is that there, there are three core service areas. If you like, uh, that you guys offer, uh, coaching management platform, uh, sound coaching, uh, trademarked, um, and customized solutions. Maybe you can take a minute or so and, and, uh, briefly walk us through each of those.

Speaker 3: 4:29

Yes, well, so when I started the company, the original hypothesis was just, you know, executive coaching was such a high touch in person or this driven model that was partially why it was so effective. But the flip side of that was that then it made it really expensive and challenging to scale, which is why coaching really stayed only at the highest ranks of leadership for such a long time. Um, and so when we started out the first hypothe, this and first product really was, you know, can we just make this model virtual and bring it to more people? So that's, you know, sort of what we talk about when we talk about sound coaching, it's this full end-to-end delivery of coaching, um, through a digital format, which we expanded from one on one models to group of coaching models and continue to develop new types of coaching, digital coaching experiences. Um, in the last year, we also have started to, um, bring our newest product to market, which is our coaching management platform. And that really was born out of starting to work with larger and larger enterprise where they found that they really loved the user journey, the digital experience that we had created for their employees and leaders. We also had, um, really robust administrative tools for companies and their administrators that were deploying programs at scale. And then of course our network that that could plug into. And so what we effectively did was expose that same software that we were using to scale our coaching to our same customers through our coaching management platform. And so it's a SaaS that lets companies effectively manage measure and scale their coaching programs. There's lots of really amazing purpose built tools for coaching that we have built that make it really easy for companies to build and deploy coaching at scale.

Speaker 2: 6:34

Excellent. Thank you very much. Uh, okay. So next question is that could be a one word question. It's why, um, what, what, why is, why is leadership coaching so relevant as a development tool for, for the current business environment? Do you think?

Speaker 3: 6:48

I think if you think about companies, leadership has always been important, right. You know, you and I have probably heard this stat so many times that people don't leave companies, they leave managers and there's a lot of research and data that shows why a leader or a manager is so critical in terms of driving employee engagement, um, you know, retention all of that. But I do think that, so my, you know, my point of is that leadership development and coaching for leadership development has always been critical. And so maybe the question is, well, then what's changed. That's really elevated the, um, attention on this and why it's really become an urgent priority for a lot of the companies we talked to. And I think a lot of that has to do do with the rapid pace of change that we are all finding ourselves in, you know, whether it is, um, at your work, um, moving to remote work, the, you know, global pandemic that continues to, um, happen, you know, two years after, um, the initial outbreak, everyth political issues, you know, everything that we have going on means that leaders are just challenged with more and more that they have to deal with every day. And I think companies are really realizing that unless they can support their leaders to be successful in these types of very fast paced, changing environments, um, they are going to have, have to then deal with, you know, the other side of that, which could mean, you know, incredible levels of burnout, stress, um, you know, challenges around not only employee engagement and retention, but even trying to bring in talent into their organizations. So I think it's just that, you know, somehow in the last few years there's been so much going on that companies are realizing that they really have to rely more on their leaders to help them really be able to move the organizations forward.

Speaker 2: 8:54

Okay. Thank you. You, you mentioned some of the challenges there such as, you know, having the P the people in place. So you're gonna attract the talent to, to push the company forward. And my goodness, me that has never been more difficult than, uh, during this great resignation, which will continue to be great in the sense that it's big, not fantastic, um, for the, for the foreseeable future, but what are, what are other typical obstacles that your clients face?

Speaker 3: 9:18

Yeah, I think, you know, in addition to, um, retention engagement of employees and making sure you can hold onto that talent, think about even onboarding talent. Once you get them right now, um, you have to think about how do you start to expose them to your company values, the leadership behaviors help support them to really be able to, um, practice those day to day. And now you're doing it in environment where you don't have the luxury of being in person being able to bring people together for a large training or, you know, typical, um, conferences or workshops. So I think thinking about leadership, um, development, even as you're, as early as onboarding new leaders, we're seeing a lot of companies look at that. I think also just that, you know, there's been a lot of attention the last few years across cultural differences, diversity equity, and inclusion. The benefit of that is that companies are really thinking about how do they build a more diverse leadership bench. And then once they start to bring that talent in, how do they help equip those leaders to be able to be successful within their company environment? So we see coaching attached to a lot of broader diversity and equity and inclusion efforts. Um, along with more, um, maybe what you'd expect, you know, a lot of manager enablement, um, high potentials ways that you can help managers develop of skills that they need to be effective leaders. Um, instead of just promoting someone into the job and hoping that they'll be successful

Speaker 2: 11:06

And just kind of a side note. So just, just maybe very briefly, but what, what do, what do you think it says to a potential employee? You know, a top candidate when the, the hiring manager or the HR person can say to them, you know what, we, we invest in our leaders, uh, if you join our team and you stick with us, we're gonna give you that development over time and, um, you know, turn you into an, even more of a superstar than you already are.

Speaker 3: 11:32

Yeah. I mean, I think just, you know, Billy even think about, if you had to go out and get a job, you know, would you feel, find that attractive? Um, I think, you know, that is the thing that most people can relate to, um, which is, you know, wouldn't it be wonderful to be in an environment where you felt like the, your company, your organization was really invested in your growth and then actually investing in that with real applicable training, coaching development, to help you really up level, not only your ability to function in that organization, but help you develop skills that you are going to be helpful you to you, even in your next role or your next job. So, um, at sounding board, actually, one of the benefits that we give is that, you know, we always eat our own dog food. And so every employee actually gets to work with a coach that comes on and it's absolutely been a huge selling point for us in attracting employees. And for many of them, this is their first time engaging with this type of experience. And it's really so eye opening and powerful for them when they realize, um, how impactful that personalized approach to development can be

Speaker 2: 12:51

Eating your own dog food. I don't think I, but I like it. I like it. Uh, listeners I've recently got a, a second dog, a puppy called Dave and he likes to eat my shoes and my socks and, uh, and anything that, that smells of me. And it's very, very annoying. Anyway, let's, let's continue, let let's continue through, um, what, what, what it industries and types of leaders suit this, this type of leadership development best.

Speaker 3: 13:19

Yeah. That's been the fun part to see, which is, you know, if you think about it, every type of organization and industry needs strong leadership, and certainly, uh, during this time they need it at every level level. And so we actually work with, um, you know, industries, every industry, whether it's technology, media, consumer goods, um, eCommerce, retail, um, and even, you know, oftentimes maybe industries that you think, um, may not be fast adopters, you know, more traditional, um, industries. But what we're finding is that because executive coaching has been around as a model for a really long time, most companies have had exposure to it in one shape of form, even if it's in the limited engagement or only for a few executives. Um, and what the value proposition here really is, well, if you've known and utilized that model for your C-suite now, because of technology, we make it more accessible, we make it more affordable. You now can bring that model down into your first time managers. Um, and that's what we're finding is really what's driving adoption across every company and industry and level. Um, and I think that, you know, in terms of where it, um, is suited best in the organization, um, you know, today more than 60 to 70% of the leaders that we coach are below the executive suite. So we're seeing that, you know, there's kind of this middle, a lot of, uh, companies might have paid a lot of attention to executive level development, and then they might have really robust programs created for first time managers, because those are two very obvious points that, you know, you have to invest in development. What we find is in that middle, as you continue to move up your career trajectory and you start to feel the pressure of, you know, having to manage up, having to manage across, having to manage down, um, that's actually a particularly effective place to utilize coaching and leadership coaching.

Speaker 2: 15:38

Now, obviously all the cool kids are coming to you guys to get support from you guys right now, you know, that that's a given, however, if, if an organization wants to maybe build this type of development internally, um, what, what sort of advice can you provide to help them get started?

Speaker 3: 15:55

Yeah, I mean, that's exactly what we see happening, which is really why we created our, you know, coaching management platform is because if you think about coaching, you know, the coaching experience you wanna deliver a C level executive is very different than the type of coaching experience you might is appropriate for a first time manager, or maybe even a, um, high potential leader that doesn't have an entire team to, um, run. And so what we see is that for companies that have really kind of taken to coaching as a model, they wanna be able to support lots of different types of coaching experiences. And part of that might be activating internal employees as coaches. We see a lot of companies sending employees to help them develop coaching skills and certifications, and then having those employees bring that capability back into the organization. But what they didn't have was enabling technology to support that, right. A lot of them were managing scheduling, matching on spreadsheets or sort of homegrown websites. And so, um, one of the ways that we helped support them is that we give them software to do that. And the software is built on all of our learnings that we have delivering coaching at scale. So all of the tools were really designed for this specific use case in mind, which is really what, you know, the child, the problem we're trying to solve is to help, um, administer, to help organizations be able to scale by using technology to create a lot of economies of skill and efficiencies through the tools.

Speaker 2: 17:44

Okay. Sounds wonderful. Any, any, uh, warnings, any red flags that you wanna, you wanna mention here? What, what, what should talent leaders avoid or be aware of when trying to build an optimal leadership coaching practice?

Speaker 3: 17:56

Well, I think like anything that might be new for an organization, it can sometimes feel overwhelming when you first start and, you know, trying to think about everything from leaders, identifying where to start, how to structure those engagements, measuring those engagements. Um, what we like to say is just get started. Um, and we certainly encourage our customers and clients to partner with us. Um, we've done this for now lots and lots of at scale. So we've learned a lot of best practices around how to approach building, um, successful coaching programs. Um, one very specific tactical tip might just be to ensure that you really have that buy-in and that, um, sponsorship and, and upfront communications across the organization. Um, whether that's to your C level, to the participants, to managers that are supporting participants around the goals for the coaching, you know, I think having people understand how they can help support the coaching showing folks that get, um, that come into to it that there's broad support for their development, even at the highest levels, all of those help create that commitment to the process, to the program and the initiative that helps the company and organization then really get the most value out of delivering something like this at scale.

Speaker 2: 19:27

Absolutely. I hear that time and again, on this show, how important it's to get buy-in, you know, get leadership, buy-in get, get the whole company on the same page, have a, have a town hall about it, say, Hey, we're doing this and these are the reasons why we're gonna do it. And if everybody gets on board with it, then we're all gonna be wonderful. We're happy people.<laugh> very important.

Speaker 3: 19:47

Yeah. I mean, I think you can't go around bill right. To over communi around any initiative, whether it's coaching or any other initiatives that are rolling out around the company. You know, most people just want to understand and have some context for the why. And I think most organizations, you know, and we have to work on this as well, have don't spend enough time communicating up front. And so that's certainly one of the most important best practices that we share.

Speaker 2: 20:17

And speaking of why, uh, because, uh, regular listeners of the show will know that I love to plug other episodes. Um, if you're listening to this episode, which is due to go live in middle-ish of, uh, April, that means that recently we had another interview with, uh, Steven, she from Simon Sinek who talks all about the wise of companies. So please do check that out. Um, two more questions for you, Christine, before we do wrap up today. Um, and this one is kind of maybe is a bit of a summary of what we've spoken about so far. What kind of results can talent leaders expect from leadership coaching done well and how are these measured?

Speaker 3: 20:53

Yeah, this is where we really feel like at sounding board, we are trying to push the needle because, you know, if you've heard a lot of times with learning measurement around learning has been a challenge, I think just for the industry overall, right. You know, moving beyond just saying someone participated in a session or a workshop, being able to share whether or not they liked it or not just showing engagement now, I think is not enough. And one of the areas that we're investing quite a bit at sounding board is not only do we wanna be able to tell you all of those basic stats, you know, how many people went through it successfully, what were their engagement rates? How well did they find that experience NPS, all of that. But we actually have structured that there are leadership capabilities that you're developing is through your engagement with your coach goals that you're working on and even business impact and professional impact and skills that you can tie those to as you work through coaching. And so we've got stats that, um, actually can show, you know, percentage increase against leadership skills. And, um, beyond that, being able to even understand, well, what was that business impact? You know, did this, ultimately, if you were a sales leader help you grow revenue and how well did that tie to those broader organizational goals. And I really think that's the direction that a lot of learning and development in this initiatives are moving, and that's really all enabled through technology. You know, we weren't able to collect all of this data previously when you were just doing it through a services model. And that's the beauty of having a technology platform and a SaaS platform to support it is that we now have, you know, almost now at the question, if what is the right data to collect, how do you wanna measure it? And I think that's the part that we'll still see, and we're continuing to push a lot of innovation around at sounding board.

Speaker 2: 23:00

And of course, listeners, you get to work with awesome, happy people like Christine. So you should definitely check it out. Hey, um, Christine, before we do wrap up for today, how can our listeners connect with personally? So maybe that's through your LinkedIn. Maybe you wanna share your email. Maybe you're really cool and you're all over TikTok<laugh> and cause I'm not. Um, and, uh, how can they also learn more about all the fantastic things happening over at sand board?

Speaker 3: 23:23

Yeah, I will say I probably watch more tos, um, than is healthy, but, um, I am on link. You can reach me. Um, I'm Christine Pau and, um, always love to connect with folks there. And that's also a platform where at sounding board, uh, we share a lot of content, including research and white papers just around what's happening with leadership coaching and how leadership development is really changing, um, and how organizations are approaching that. So would definitely encourage folks to, you know, follow us on social media, on LinkedIn, um, sounding board, Inc. Um, and then our website sounding, which is sounding board inc.com, but you know, I'm always excited to connect with companies and talent leaders that are really thinking deeply about how they want to have more impact through the programs that they're deploying. Because I think right now there is just so much appetite from that. Not only from the organizations, but the employees themselves are really thirsting for these types of experiences.

Speaker 2: 24:35

So what Christine is saying, listeners is get on it, come on, get<laugh>. Okay. Well that just leads me to say for today, I've a, I've a, a great time chatting to you today. You've got amazing positive and you've got a fantastic team behind you who I've really enjoyed working with so far, such as. I'm just gonna do a shout out to Kelly. Who's listening in on this call today, for example. Um, but that just leads me to say for today, Christine, thank you very much for being my guest on this episode of the HR chat show.

Speaker 3: 25:01

Thank you so much for having me bill. I look forward to, um, speaking again soon

Speaker 2: 25:07

And listeners as always until next time. Happy working.

Speaker 1: 25:13

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR chat podcast. There are hundreds of conversations with business experts available for free on the is at website, apple, Spotify, and all the main platforms and her to like subscribe and follow us on social media.