The team is the client
When people look for a leadership coach they usually mean someone who works with one executive. I do something next door to that, and for a founder-led company I think it is more useful: I coach the leadership team as a unit. Five or six people, one room, one set of commitments all of them can see.
The reason is practical. A founder can become a much better leader while the company stays stuck, because the people around the founder still don’t know what they own, still wait for the founder to decide, and still leave the weekly meeting with the real issue untouched. In a company of forty people leadership is a team sport, so that is how I coach it.
The Accountability Chart comes first
Most of the leadership problems I see in a first session are structure problems in disguise. Two people think they own marketing. Nobody owns cash. The founder holds four seats and does two of them well.
EOS starts with an Accountability Chart. It looks like an org chart and asks a harder question: what are the major functions of this business, and who is the one person accountable for each? Seats first, then people. It is the least glamorous tool in the system and it changes the most.
Visionary and Integrator
The chart usually exposes the seat founders find hardest to fill. EOS calls it the Integrator, the person who runs the leadership team day to day, turns the vision into a plan and breaks ties. The founder is often the Visionary, the one with the ideas, the relationships and the big calls. Those two seats need different people more often than founders want to hear.
Sorting that out is leadership coaching in the most literal sense. It is also where a lot of Los Angeles companies stall, because an owner who built the business alone does not hand its daily running to someone else easily.
How the coaching runs
A full-day session every quarter, where the team reviews the last ninety days, sets new Rocks and solves its biggest issues. An annual session to reset the plan. A weekly meeting the team runs on its own. Across all of it I watch for the pattern the team is too close to see, and I say it out loud, which is most of what a leadership team pays an outsider for.
Sessions are at my Santa Monica office or at yours.
Industry guide: EOS® for Staffing and Recruiting Firms in Los Angeles
What leadership teams ask
Do you coach individual executives?
Not as a separate engagement. I coach individuals inside the team, where the commitments are public and the team holds each other to them. If someone needs private executive coaching, I will say so.
What is the difference between a Visionary and an Integrator?
The Visionary generates ideas, keeps the big relationships and sets direction. The Integrator runs the leadership team, owns the plan and makes the business run day to day. Plenty of companies need both, and the founder is rarely both.
What if the leadership team does not trust each other?
Then that is the first issue, not a side topic. EOS has specific exercises for it, and the quarterly rhythm gives the team repeated practice at hard conversations in a structured room.
How long until the team runs this without you?
Most teams own the tools after about two years of quarterly sessions. Some keep an outside facilitator longer because it makes the quarterly day better, which is a choice rather than a dependency.
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