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Updated
April 23, 2024
If you’ve ever wondered about the ins-and-outs of executive coaches – how does it work, how do you find one; I’m not an “executive,” is it still for me? – this is an episode for you!
Host Tim Cynova is in conversation with Farah Bala, a certified executive coach and founder of Farsight, an agency dedicated to leadership and organizational development with a focus on equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-oppression practices. Their conversation covers a lot of ground, from the philosophical to the practice, with some highlights from the discussion below.
Episode Highlights
04:15 The Essence and Impact of Coaching
08:10 Coaching for Everyone: Breaking Down the Myths
12:09 The Intersection of Coaching and Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
18:28 Navigating Privilege and Responsibility in Coaching and Beyond
24:00 The Power of Perspective in Coaching and Creating Change
25:10 Choosing the Right Coach: A Personal Journey
26:16 The Impact of Identity on Coaching Choices
27:26 The Art of Asking the Right Questions
29:55 The Evolution of Coaching in Virtual Workplaces
33:32 Self-Care: The Coach's Perspective
41:02 Leveraging Improv for Coaching Skills
42:36 Understanding Coaching Costs and Arrangements
46:36 Expanding Access to Coaching
Mentioned in the podcast: Farsight Friday EP26: Coaching for Inclusion
Bios
Farah Bala is a Leadership EDIA (Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Anti-Oppression) Executive Coach, Consultant and Speaker. As Founder & CEO of FARSIGHT, Farah's mission is to support organizations and leaders redefine the concept of leadership by making Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, Anti-Oppression a core leadership competency. Her clients include executives in the C-suite, creatives and entrepreneurs, and organizations across wide-ranging sectors and industries. She is also a faculty coach at multiple learning and development institutions. Farah believes equity and inclusion are the foundational pillars for effective leadership and communication.
Farah’s speaking engagements include Yale University, Ford Foundation, Voice America, NY Travel Festival, Travel Unity, Adirondack Diversity Initiative, Asian American Arts Alliance, among others. She is a sought after speaker at national conferences, most recently at SHPE and SASE. Farah is also the creator and host of FARSIGHT FRIDAY, a video podcast started in 2020 in response to the heightened racism and divisiveness of marginalized communities. communities. She is a recipient of the Diversity Award by the World Zoroastrian Organization, recognized for her work in raising awareness towards gender, culture, racial equity and inclusion globally.
Farah holds an MFA in Theater from Sarah Lawrence College, and is a graduate of the Institute of Professional Excellence in Coaching (iPEC) Program. She is a Professional Certified Executive Coach (PCC) with the International Coach Federation, and is certified in the Energy Leadership Index (ELI), EQ-i 2.0 and EQ 360 assessments, and Character Strengths Intervention. She is featured in Umbrage Edition’s national award-winning book Green Card Stories as one of 50 profiles of recent immigrants from around the world.
Having worked as a performing artist and producer for over two decades, Farah has used the tools of the theater in arts education developing social-emotional learning in NYC public schools and international volunteering initiatives, and as of the last decade, in professional environments across multiple industries. If you would like to learn more about Farah’s artistic work, please visit her website.
Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of Work. Shouldn’t. Suck., an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.
Transcript
Farah Bala:
Organizations have been built with your strategy, your value system, your mission, your budgeting, all of that has been considered and EDIA concepts or systems were not considered. And then, you started building something and a quarter along the way, sometimes halfway along the way, someone said, "Oh, what about diversity? Oh, what about inclusion?" It's like, "Oh yeah, we need that, so let's slap it on." Snap it on something that's already been built and has roots, and so then that becomes a band-aid and the adhesive of that band-aid will wear off if work has not been done to create roots for that new initiative.
And that's why we're still having these conversations. That's why we're still doing this work because the adhesive has worn off over and over and over again.
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work. Shouldn't. Suck, a podcast about well, that. In this episode, I'm excited to connect with the amazing Farah Bala. Farah is an intercultural leadership and communication specialist, coach and speaker. Her agency Farsight focuses on leadership and organizational development that prioritizes equity, diversity, inclusion and anti-oppression practices. She facilitates and leads individual and group programs globally for Fortune 500 companies to non-profit organizations, with clients that includes C-suites, emerging leaders, creatives and entrepreneurs in wide-ranging sectors from finance to law, technology to media, entertainment and beyond.
Farah is also a faculty coach at multiple learning and development institutions and believes equity and inclusion are foundational pillars for effective leadership and communication. And it's this last piece that I'm particularly excited to explore during our conversation today. Having been asked by countless people over the last several years, if I know any coaches who center equity and inclusion in their practice. You can find more about Farah and the Farsight Agency in our bio linked in the episode description, so let's get going. Farah, welcome to the podcast.
Farah Bala:
Thank you, Tim. Thank you for that introduction and thank you for having me.
Tim Cynova:
I'm very excited about our conversation today. Before, we really dive in, why don't we just start with how do you typically introduce yourself and the work that you do?
Farah Bala:
I like to introduce myself through story and identity. My ancestry is Persian. I grew up in India. I was born in Lagos, Nigeria and now, I live in the United States. And so hyphenated identity, and I think that is complemented by my current existence, which is a hyphenated intersectional trajectory of experience and career passing. I moved to the states to study theater. I have background, a parallel journey as a performer, producer and arts educator using tools of theater and improvisation and learning environments, starting off in the public schools of New York City and then, I'm transferring that to doing the same work through the same techniques in national volunteering initiatives and professional companies literally all over the world.
Where I am today is I use all of that in my work as a leadership and organizational consultant and coach through Farsight. I think where I am now is really connecting all of these dots of how do we connect leadership to creating healthy work cultures through having equitable inclusive lens to how we build communities within our workplaces. For me, I see the intersection of identity with the intersection of everything that I do. I'm also an executive coach, I should say that right? Given the topic at hand, I am a certified executive coach, and yes, my focus is building socially conscious leaders.
Tim Cynova:
And speaking of coaching, as I mentioned in the introduction to this episode and something we've talked about offline, I'm excited about those who center values, especially values of equity, inclusion, justice, anti-racism, anti-oppression in their coaching practice, before I guess we really dig into that, maybe we should pull up from the page first and start with what exactly is coaching and how does a coach differ from a mentor or a manager or even a therapist?
Farah Bala:
Great question, Tim. Yes, that's how I start every potential client call. Let's start with what is coaching. The way I like to put it is the process of coaching is about starting from where you're at and looking ahead, to where you want to be or what the goals are for the future. You're starting as a present and you move to the future. The process is about clearing the path to one's goals, addressing anything that might be getting in the way, learning more about oneself as needed, if needed along the way. The whole process of coaching is let's get you to who you want to be or where you want to be, in terms of whoever is looking for a coach.
The difference, so let's start with therapy. Therapy starts from the present and looks backwards. It goes into the past to understand why, understanding where one has come from or why am I the way I am, what has shaped me, et cetera. The goal is really to reconcile the past to being more conscious in the present. And with coaching, we are starting from the present to look ahead. That does not mean that we don't step into the past. Sometimes we do need to step into the past because of stories that we might have created for ourselves or narratives that have been driving us that we've not necessarily interrogated.
We've not necessarily asked ourselves is this belief, is this thought process or value system truly mine based on who I am today or is it something that occurred decades ago and that I just assumed to be true of me today? Sometimes, it's the case that it is true and sometimes it isn't. So we do step back, but the goal is not to stay in the past. The goal is to reconcile anything about the past to move ahead. You mentioned mentorship, a mentor-mentee relationship is all about the mentor. It's all about their journey, their experiences, their successes, their failures, and the mentee is learning through their stories. In a coaching relationship, it's all about the coachee or the client.
It is not about the coach. I always say, "I am only effective if I am on your journey. My client's journey." That means that I'm not coming in with my stories, I'm not coming in with my successes or failures or what has worked for me because it's not about me. It's about the client, who they are, who they wish to be and where they've been. And so coaching, I call it a thought partnership to achieve the client's goals. I sometimes say it's a brain expansion, two sets of neural pathways. Trying to solve for something can be exponentially more effective and adventurous in a good way than one set of neural pathways.
What are the distinctions were there? Manager. A lot of the work that we do is to develop leaders and managers to be effective coaches to their team members. Let me go to the default role of manager that has been perpetuated to move across industries and organizations that a manager gets work done from their team members, right? It's all about projects, deadlines, deliverables, accountability. There are some developmental goals within that, but it's all very task and work related and managers also come with their agendas. Even if a team member is being developed, it's through the lens of either a manager's divisions or organization's agenda.
While your team member might be growing and developing, they might be growing via a slice or a side role of something much bigger than who they're made up of.
Tim Cynova:
I feel like there's a perception that coaches are only for, "big time executives." It's like the C-suites that get coaches and as someone who's personally benefited and had the privilege of being able to work with a coach in the workplace in particular when our organization was going through a period of change and I needed that outside perspective and lens and mirror and I definitely wasn't a big time executive, I know that that perception is incorrect. You've worked with big time executives and like everyone across the spectrum of sectors and roles, who typically works with a coach. How do they work with a coach and what are some of the things they're working on?
Farah Bala:
So you are saying who is coaching for, right? Is it only for executives? No, I always say, if you can benefit from a coach, get a coach, and I also say every coach should have a coach for multiple reasons. The coaching industry is widespread. You have everything from executive coaching to career coaching to presentation coaching to life coaching, even in the workplace sometimes health and fitness coaching, and there is always a niche, leadership coaching. So if you take career leadership, executive coaching, they have a lot of overlaps, they have a lot of synergies. What can you bring to a coaching process?
It's anything from I need to upskill. I'm looking for a coach specifically to develop my HR lens within an organization because that's one of my aspirations and the feedback that I'm getting currently is that I'm not quite there yet. I want to get some, not training per se, but how can I work with a coach to expand my current perspective, skill set expertise towards getting to that position. Some people come for, "Hey, I am a brand new leader and I have no idea what I'm doing. I was really good at what I did, which is why I got this promotion and now I'm suddenly a people leader. I have never managed people before. How do I do that?"
Sometimes organizations sponsor coaching in terms of this is a really high performer, but their communication skills are lacking. They really just need to work on that. We have high level executives and C-suites come through to say there is a lot going on and I just need a space, I need a thought partner. I need to just work through strategy. So there is so much that you can bring to a coaching relationship and there's really nothing that's off the table. You could be coming to me for a solid executive coaching engagement and we might start the conversation with something that happened at home or the challenge that you're facing with the kids.
And I always say that the personal and the professional are very integrated. They're not separate. We are trained. We are wired to think that they are like, my personal stuff is here, my work self is here, but each informs the other. Because of that, a lot of how we show up in one space is how we show up in another. So there are so many transferable skills in that way. I just had someone come to me saying, I'm over a year in my job. I'm settled in and I know I'm going to be here for a little longer, but I want to start looking ahead in terms of trajectory. So once to get into a coaching engagement to just explore what's next.
A little bit of strategy, a little bit of mapping out how we get there, et cetera. Given the topic of this conversation, sometimes I've had a few White leaders come to me in the last few years to say, "Hey, I need to do better as a leader within the organization. I don't know what I don't know." So, I just need a safe space to unpack. I'm hearing about privilege, I'm hearing about Whiteness. I don't know what that is or the patriarchy and masculinity, and I just need a space to process that, to unpack that and get tools of how we do things differently or how I can be a more effective leader, how I can create more inclusion, belonging, psychological safety for my team, for my organization.
Tim Cynova:
Let's dive in a little bit more into that point you were just talking about, where you're working with white guys in the organization about things that they might not know about. I mentioned in the intro that, well, certainly since the summer of 2020, I've received a lot of inquiries about if I knew coaches that centered equity inclusion, anti-racism in their practice, and this is something that you do and I'm curious how that informs your approach to coaching that might be different than someone who doesn't.
Farah Bala:
I get asked this question a lot, Tim and I didn't learn to integrate it. I am a Persian-Indian, now American, light-skinned woman, living in the United States. In my first three months in the country, I was in the lobby of my graduate school and a very well-meaning person told me, "Farah, you're going to be working twice as hard as everyone else because in this country, you are considered a woman of color." Race was ascribed to me at that time. I was much younger, very naive, bright eye, bushy tail, and I was like, "Okay, I'll do that. I'll work twice as hard as everyone else." So when you live with that, when you are told that, when the ceiling has already been set for you, you're living it.
It's not outside of who I am. A lot of work that we're doing with our clients right now is how do you cultivate an equity lens? How do you cultivate an EDIA lens? Also, I should say for your listeners, we use EDIA equity, diversity, inclusion, anti-oppression. So when I say EDIA, that's what I mean. How do you cultivate that lens across all areas of your work? For me, it's my lived experience that cultivated it. I didn't have to go do a training to understand diversity, to understand what it is like to be excluded because it happened. I'm just talking from a race perspective. You could say the same from a gender perspective, you can say the same from an LGBTQ plus perspective, you can say the same from a neurodiverse or disability perspective.
The groups that have been historically marginalized don't have the opportunity to have that outside of themselves. You just have it because you are living it. I'm not choosing to show up as a woman of color, but that's how I am being perceived and so that the melding starts happening and now, I own it and I lead with it with pride, and that is why I start with identity. My origins, what I call the simple origin, geographical story, because having lived and worked where I have and being treated in different ways, depending where I'm at, you just have it. For me, my interest was how do I integrate that into what I have learned as a facilitator?
How do I integrate that into what I've learned as a coach? So that's what has always been exciting for me and that is why I created Farsight, because for me it was always separate. You talk about unconscious bias, but you're not necessarily connecting it to how biases have created systems of oppression within which there is so much harm and level setting, ceiling-level setting that has been caused that is very limiting to certain populations more than others or doing a communication workshop where my colleagues who might not be women or might not be people of color, might not notice certain nuances or pick up on certain cultural aspects that I would.
I'm not saying that you only have to be a person of color to have a DEI lens, but since you're asking me, it's who I am, it's what I had lived. It's my lived experiences, my observations, my aspirations of who we can be collectively as a humanity that inform the EDIA lens to all of the work, which is why for me, it's a core belief that leadership is not separate from equity, diversity, inclusion, anti-oppression. It's all connected, but we have been wired, we have been taught that it is different. Something else that I tell our clients, especially when we're doing strategy work with them is that historically organizations have been built with your strategy, your value system, your mission, your budgeting.
All of that has been considered and EDIA concepts or systems were not considered. And then, you started building something and a quarter along the way, sometimes halfway along the way, someone said, "Oh, what about diversity? Oh, what about inclusion?" It's like, "Oh yeah, we need that, so let's slap it on." Slap it on something that's already been built and has roots. So then that becomes a band-aid and the adhesive of that band-aid will wear off if work has not been done to create roots for that new initiative. And that's why we're still having these conversations. That's why we're still doing this work because the adhesive has worn off over and over and over again. I'm talking about the organizational space right now.
Let's localize it in a coaching engagement. The value of someone being with a coach who brings in that equity lens, who brings in the inclusion belonging diversity lens, and if they are building themselves up as a leader, if they're looking to be more effective, if they're looking to grow their people leadership skills, that coaching engagement is going to help them build those roots of analysis from the ground up. And that is the value of that one-on-one time that you might be a really effective leader in terms of getting the bottom line, aligning with organizational strategy, community engagement, whatever else that requires you to.
And if this comes across as a gap or if you realize it's a gap and you want to develop it, a coaching relationship can be really, really helpful in building those roots, so that it's not an adhesive, that you can actually grow those competencies moving forward.
Tim Cynova:
In 2013, one of the organization I was with, started our work in earnest around anti-racist and anti-oppression. Well, the very first things the facilitator said was, if you're a White person, don't go to the people of color to answer your questions. Don't further oppress the people who are already oppressed to help you figure it out. Go to other White people, who might further along in the journey where you might be. And as I think about the work that you do as a coach, and also, when I was going through my training as a mediator, they talked about how a mediator as a neutral party, but mediation isn't a neutral impact on the mediator.
I imagine that might be the case in coaching relationships. When I think about care, when I think about wellbeing, when I think about built-in versus band-aid, when I think about how you center these values in your work, how does that play out in your coaching practice?
Farah Bala:
When you talked about the example a few years ago, White folk were told, don't go to people of color for your questions. May I just dig into that a little bit?
Tim Cynova:
Please, yeah. That was a specific thing that our facilitator who came in, specifically, it was focused a year on anti-oppression. We started our work, focused on anti-oppression. That was one of the very first things as it preceded the work that then went into race-based caucusing in the workplace, that these are the places where you should have those conversations.
Farah Bala:
I want to add some context and nuance because I don't consider that statement absolute truth. This might be a controversial thing that I just said and let me say why. In the work that I have done, in my own lived experiences, every identity of privilege has that same level of responsibility, so it's not just White folk, it's cis folk like me, able-bodied folk like me, neurotypical folk like me, Now, US citizen, right? Citizenship being a space of English speakers, et cetera. I think it's really, really important that when we talk about this work, every single person, including people of color have a responsibility because every single person holds levels of privilege accountability to doing something better.
Now, within that, lived experiences, have a spectrum of harm that has caused trauma, that has been embedded and perpetuated and a reversal of that ... and/or I should say a reversal of that. And again, I can only speak for myself as someone who identifies as an immigrant in this country has seen every immigrant status from student to citizen and seen how privilege, autonomy agency just increases. As you get to that ultimate top, in quotes. It's the same thing growing up as a person of color, as an artist who's now a business owner, that's a whole other level of responsibility. That's a whole other level of accountability and privilege that comes with what do I do now, with what I have?
If I could stress because I want to use every opportunity I can to do this, that it's on every single person. It's not just on White folk. Now, I want to address what you said. I had a fascinating experience in 2020 when my black and brown friends, Asian friends were on a spectrum of capability of how much they could give off themselves. There was a percentage that was like, do not come to me. I am just taking care of myself right now because I cannot do ... or my family, I am worried about my safety or I'm just shutting off and I am not plugging into the news.
And then, there were others who were engaging with each other online in big spaces saying, "Hey, if you have questions, me as a Black person, me as a Brown person, me as an Asian person want to help you understand or want to help you get to the bottom of whatever your questions are," so use me as a resource. It goes without saying we, were all hurting in 2020 and there were certain spaces, again, when we are localizing it to specific organizations or specific teams when we know ... a lot of calling out was happening versus calling in, a lot of people were speaking up, and so there is always going to be a spectrum.
I would hate for anyone to assume that me as this identity can never go to this identity, because it's seeing it in such a siloed black and white way, no pun intended to black and white. Rather if we could engage our own curiosity of who can I go to and why and check our own assumptions of, "Oh, I can go to Tim for this, but really can I, have I checked in with him about it? Is he open to having this conversation?" Those moments of co-creation, of a possibility of what else we can talk about is where I think the work is. Everyone talks about the work, do the work. I think it's in these micro moments of how we make choices of who we go to, how we make choices of who we get be vulnerable with and say, "Hey, I messed up or this is very obvious to everyone else around me. I am still not clear about this, or I have resistances to X, Y, Z."
And again, bringing it back to this is where you can bring all of that into a coaching conversation. You can bring all of that into the space.
Tim Cynova:
There's also something here that you raised where part of the magic, if you will, of working with coaches is that they bring different perspectives. It's like if I wanted the same perspective, I would just sit around and think to myself, but that's kind of the beauty where every way diversity, thought, experience, lived experience, everything makes for richer teams and experiences in life and to be able to have those allows us to see things differently and come up with different solutions and co-create them at this time in our lives, we're like the same old, same old is not working and there is no template for what we're trying to do when we're trying to co-create thriving futures. So I think that's, in particular, really important piece of it.
Farah Bala:
How do you pick your coach? There are certain identities that wanted the same identity and that is okay. There's no right way to pick your coach, and there's also no right path to, as a South Asian or a mixed race woman, that's the coach I want, because there's so much else. It's based on what your goals are. It's based on who they are, what their expertise is, and then the most important is the magic that happens when you first connect with them. Anyone who comes to me inquiring, I always say, please interview at least three coaches before you come to your decision, because it's a very, very intimate relationship that you're going to get into.
And you really want to feel a connection there. I'll give you an example. There was someone who came to me, who is I think one level down from CEO right now at his organization. He just did this big job a couple of years ago and as he was interviewing a few people ... I told him this when we spoke and he's a Black man. I said, interview a whole bunch of people, and then he came back and he was like, "I have a little bit of a conundrum," because I loved our conversation. I can see us working together and I met this other coach who has been CEO and I want to be CEO and he can lay down the map for me and I need help choosing, and of course, I cannot help anyone to choose their coach and that person was a White man.
I give you this example as identities play a role, but they are not the only factor. Now conversely, you might have a person of color who is carrying a lot of workplace trauma and they want to heal from that, speaking of care. Because of the trauma that they're holding, they are finding themselves limited and they're not able to get to their full potential. They're not able to see themselves set up for success, and so they want to do some work and the only person they will trust is a coach from that identity and that is okay, so it's very situational. I might be of a certain identity looking to do more community work within the same identity, so then, I will go looking for a coach with that identity.
There's a lot of context. There's no, if I am a Indian person, I only go to an Indian coach. If I am a Black person, I only go to a Black coach. There is an intersection complex spectrum of various criteria that you want to make the most thoughtful decision going into it. I always encourage people, it's not right and wrong, it's about staying intentional, staying thoughtful, and it will likely be the best decision for you if you give it that due diligence.
Tim Cynova:
What kind of questions do you encourage people to ask potential coaches?
Farah Bala:
Everything. Ask them about their experience. Ask them about case studies, clients that they have or training. I'll divest a little bit, when I got certified. People cautioned me around, make sure you get accredited with a credible institution. Now, there is plenty out there. There is a lot more. The coaching industry is at a whole other level. There was a big push for, "Do your due diligence in getting a program that really gives you the training," because you have someone's life and future in your hand. I would ask clients to ask people they're interviewing where they went, do your own research on solid, good accredited institutions.
Some people love assessments. The coaching process can be very assessment heavy for people who like that in terms of getting a snapshot of who they are or a snapshot of a situation or a snapshot of some 360 feedback, that you want someone who brings that to the table. You might be stepping into an executive role and you are family planning. How important is it that your coach be able to hold both of those spaces for you? Ask all of the questions and sometimes that's the beauty of interviewing various coaches because a coach might disclose something that you might want to go back to the other one and say, "Hey, what is your perspective on this? Get curious about the coach in a way that helps you see if they can support you."
Not to test them, not to pull the rug up from under them, none of that. The other thing that I would also encourage is when coming to a call, be ready to really share why you're there because that's when the magic happens with your coach. I always say as a coach, I am led by the client because remember what I said, it's not my agenda. I'm not mapping out your journey for you. You tell me where you want to be and then we map it together. So for a potential coach to be effective with you, the more you share about who you are, what your challenges are, where your growth opportunities are that you see, and also what your resistances are, the more that coach can be effective in how they show up to you, and the ways in which they might be able to support you, that can then help you make your decision.
Tim Cynova:
We focus maybe primarily on individual coaching relationships. One of the things that I've heard increasingly over the past couple of years with hybrid workplaces or entirely virtual workplaces where teams have never met each other, coaches who are working with teams in organizations to help them be better teams together, can you talk a little bit more about that dynamic and for teams who are like, "Oh, actually that sounds like a pretty good idea for our team, we might need one." How do you suggest people go about approaching that aspect?
Farah Bala:
Getting an understanding of what you want out of that? How do you want your coach to help you? I've done work with teams where it's just like we are new to each other, we're in a transitional year and we need to build trust and align on how we communicate with each other. Sometimes it is to pseudo-mediation. We have new leadership and the rest of the leaders have just come out of a very traumatic leadership experience, and so we need some realignment. I'm just giving instances and sometimes it's all connected, sometimes it's all strategy. We need to create an EDIA strategy and we are working with the not just EDIA committee, but also the sponsor leadership who is moving the initiative forward.
It might not just be an EDIA strategy, it can be an organizational strategy, it can be a transition strategy, change management. Change management is another big topic where teams can really leverage a coach. Conflict. Conflict resolution. I think for me it's woven into the building of trust, building of how we communicate with each other. Role clarification, how do we deal with conflict? One of the big things organizationally, I say to create a true space of intention and belonging, you have to have a culture of healthy conflict, and what that means is if you and I are working together, I have to be able to tell you I disagree with you. You and I have to be able to get into a heated conversation and then, check in about the kids or whatever else we know of each other.
The possibility of healthy conflict only comes from a bed of foundation of that trust and relationality. For me, that is foundational to all of the work that comes after. Something else, I was going to say about team effectiveness. You might have individual leaders, but collectively, there is no united leadership voice that can really be detrimental to the perception of leadership within an organization, building that unity, exploring and then refining a collective voice of who do we want to be as influencers in this organization? We might have our own goals, but then what are our goals and how then do we execute them?
How do we activate them? That's where having an executive coach at the table can be really, really helpful. An outside perspective, my goodness, I love being the fly on the wall. I love seeing something in a different way or just seeing something that someone's never heard before. I call that breaking the brain or stretching those neural pathways because that's where the growth opportunity is and so there is so much value to bringing someone from the outside, even just as observers sometimes before the work actually starts of how are meetings run? How is space taken? Who speaks and who doesn't? All of those observations, having that third party come in.
Assess the current dynamics and then, make recommendations after and then work with the team towards those recommendations can be, my gosh, so useful.
Tim Cynova:
And so how do you take care of yourself when you are the person at the nexus point of those conversations?
Farah Bala:
I learned the practice of self-care through my journey as a coach, facilitator and consultant holding space is what we do, whether it's for an individual, whether it's for a room, and pre-pandemic I was traveling all the time living out of this little carry-on airports and I had to create my own practices for replenishing what I call my boundaries. So I would not schedule clients on a travel day. It would be administrative work. I never do back-to-back sessions with clients, whether if we have a client workshop that is three or four hours long, there is no client delivery happening for the rest of the day.
If I have, it's a coaching day. There are significant breaks in between. Then, for my own self, my own personal nourishment, whatever that is, whether it's being with community, whether it's health and fitness, et cetera. I learned that very quickly. The self-care was not something that ... Now, I think people growing up in this time, I'm hearing it a lot more, but I never had that. I was like, "I'm fine, I'm fine," and then my body just didn't keep up and so I was like, oh, if I don't take care of myself, I'm not effective at what I do. Okay. That's reason enough to start taking care of myself, so I always say I learned about the practice of self-care, because we've learned about self-care.
We hear it all the time, but what it takes to practice it and activate it growing in this work and it is essential. Remember when I said every coach needs a coach? That's part of the self-care piece. In that moment, I or you will have had to show up, do what is needed to be effective and have a successful outcome for the client, right? Because remember, it's not about you in that space, but then what are you going to do with everything that came up for you? You might have been triggered, something might have happened, like you're talking about divorce, you might have witnessed something, a dynamic in the room that brought up something about your own early life and if you do not deal, resolve that then starts influencing how we start showing up.
Something that I see to my team as well is that to do this work, we have to have a growth mindset. All of this work is around growth mindset. By the way, our call to action at Farsight is do more, do better, do it differently. So it's just assuming that there is something that we can do more. There's something that we can do differently and there's something that we can do better. So, it's that perpetual curiosity of how do we get there? What could I have done differently next time? And that piece I think sets the foundation for both care for self, but also then, being able to show someone else that perspective and that possibility.
A lot of the times, Tim, the initial part of a coaching process is just slowing someone down because they're in the mode of putting out fires and dealing with emergencies and it's like, "All right, let's just, for lack of a better word, calm things down, slow things down." The other side to this is without self-care, without the care, making decisions that cause harm. In the science of unconscious bias, we already know that when you are stressed, when you are running against a deadline, when lack of sleep, lack of nutrition, all of those moments start the automated neural pathways to kick in. We want to do what we know and when we only decide within the realm of what we know, that's when intuition happens.
Because we are not considering other possibilities. My god, self-care, self-care, self-care, all the way. We talked a lot about a coaching engagement. I've said every coach needs a coach. Everyone can avail of coaching, should avail of coaching. I want to also emphasize that you could have the coaching skills to be an effective leader without necessarily going through a coaching certification and those skills are being a darn good listener, learning to respond versus react and just being effusive about your curiosity, being a really good curious investigator of those open-ended. What, why, how, explain this. Describe this.
Being able to reflect back what you're hearing. Those are core coaching skills, because your audience is likely, organizations and leaders who are wanting to do better, we actually did a podcast episode right now called Coaching for Intuition, Unpacking Why. If you are a leader of people, you need to be honing your coaching because it is as much your job to get the deliverable out of your team as it is to invest in their success, invest in their pathways to who they want to be in the future, whether within the organization or outside of it, and those are separate coaching conversations to have. Yes, the value of a coaching engagement and working with a coach and leaders get real good at asking curious questions, especially questions the answers to which you don't know.
Get really good at just staying silent and letting the other person talk it through and coming back with some key reflections. Get really good at not problem solving all the time. Your role as leaders is to problem solve, but as a coach, it's to help the other person come to their conclusion, on their own. It builds agency, it builds confidence, it builds trust. There is so much ROI to having a handful of coaching skills that you can get really good at that can help your team come together cohesively and you being an effective people leader.
Tim Cynova:
For those who are thinking, that sounds awesome, what are your suggestions for some resources that they should check out? Books, classes, certification programs to get better at maybe the skills of coaching without actually maybe becoming an officially certified coach?
Farah Bala:
Let's start with certification programs. There are a handful that I had heard of then that I still hear of now. There is IPEC. That's where I went. Institution for Professional Excellence in Coaching. There is Coach Training Institute and now they're co-active. Columbia University has an executive coaching program. If none of them, my recommendation is to find a program that is in some form affiliated with ICF, which is at the International Coach Federation. There are other centralized standards for coaching, but I'm personally affiliated with ICF because it has a code of ethics, it has a really solid formal process that every coach of theirs do for your clients. They want to make sure that they're in good hands.
So you want to make sure that you have done the due diligence to have someone feel that way and also, when you go through a program, you're going to work on yourself, friends, it's work. Something that we say is we don't have our clients do anything we're not willing to do ourselves. There is huge value to doing that work, what I call unpacking the baggage, identifying what is where and then repacking it into luggage, organized luggage. Do improv, you're going to meet some incredible humans. You're going to build your own confidence as a speaker and you're going to learn some foundational principles of what it takes to listen, what it takes to build with what someone else has said, what it takes to make the best lemonade out of whatever lemons you've been dealt.
I am the product of arts education, so there is always going to be a plug for that, but seriously, go take improv. The way you listen, the way you communicate will change and shift for the better.
Tim Cynova:
I have a colleague who's a very accomplished fundraiser in New York City and I was asking her, how did you get to do what you do? She's like, the best thing I ever did for my career was I took an improv course. To your point, you're going into a lot of different situations that you're not sure how they're going to respond and that ability to listen and reflect. I love that, that it probably is useful for any career in any profession to take an improv course.
Farah Bala:
My gosh, transferable skills, the best lawyer fighting a case will have benefited from drama school, from being in the school play. These are foundational skills. Improv skills are foundational skills. Go to the Moth, do some storytelling work. You will learn about crafting your message, you will learn about influence. You will learn about communicating in a way that your audience can hear it. In improv, you will hear about getting out of your own head and getting curious about everyone else in the room. All of that is again, foundational for how you show up to your team. How do you show up to your people.
Tim Cynova:
So far, I imagine people who are listening are thinking, who might be new to this? How much does coaching cost? What does a typical relationship look like? Is it four sessions? Is it four months? I can imagine that the spectrum is wide on this one with cost and kind of relationships and frequency. What are maybe some more typical arrangements for people who might be new to coaching relationships?
Farah Bala:
I can only speak for myself, so let me tell you how I've evolved the coaching process. I started doing coaching by the hour. First, it was a set of sessions and then, as I was building my own experience around it, I realized I now had data working with clients of what felt good and for me, an hour just wasn't enough. Then, I started shifting that, that I don't do an hour sessions. Then it went into we are being limited by the number of sessions. And then, I had data around, "Okay, what is the minimum amount of time it takes for shifts to happen based on a client's goals?" So for me, first I landed at three months and now, I'm closer to six months and the minimum I will work with someone and it's a time commitment because of the work that's involved.
Now, I just have these packages in place that are not necessarily per session or by the hour, but it's either three, six or 12-month processes and it's more now six, nine and 12-month processes. For returning clients who have a solid foundation, then it's just brushing up and so that looks different. That can be on a per session basis or a need-based basis of like, "I need to talk through something or I might be up for a different role," and sit through that or something happened at work, et cetera. Pre-pandemic, and I'm sure this is the case now too, there are different frameworks. I'm just sharing mine. There was a framework where you just do a half-day intensive with someone.
Then, that looks different, with teams especially, it could become a half-day off-site or a full-day off-site or a two-day off-site. You're still with a coach, but it has a different feel, it has the intensiveness feel to it. I have peers and colleagues who do it by the hour. It could be weekly, bimonthly, quarterly, again, depending on the relationship, who the coach and client are, how the coach works and level of work that's needed. The other thing is coaches come with certifications, so people might do personality tests like Hogan and, my God, there are so many others. I do the energy leadership assessment, and look through that of what assessments might be good for you based on where you are at.
Do your coaches do 360 feedback. That's another big one as well, especially for creating ... being an intrusive leader and that's something I am always telling clients. At some point, we are going to do a 360, where you are asking your people for feedback and then, we curate that whole process so that the goal start shifting and changing as needed based on what is needed of them from their people. Cost really varies. I love the way you started this conversation, Tim, that only executives need to have coaching engagements. The one thing I find myself saying more and more to leaders is ask your organization what kind of professional development budgeting that you can avail of.
I have had clients say, "My organization is matching this, or they are sponsoring this, or I'll pay for it and they'll reimburse me, or they're doing 50% of it." So definitely ask, and then in the nonprofit sector, there are always grants for professional development, so do some of that due diligence, do some of that research, especially when you're working with a coach with a marginalized identity, just knowing that you want to be fair in how you show up with a coach as well because it is their livelihood. That's something that I will always emphasize. Now, in terms of accessibility for more coaching, I want to share this organization called Coaching for Everyone. One of their founders, Victor McGuire was out on a recent Coaching for Inclusion episode.
Coaching for Everyone is a nonprofit organization that does two things. One, it offers subsidized coaching to BIPOC leaders. And then, they also partner with the likes of CTI, Coach Training Institute and IPEC to offer coaching certification [inaudible 00:47:11] who are interested at, again, a subsidized price. I love everything about this organization. I love that this space exists because I am sending people there. Folk who are looking for coaching. Folk who are interested in pursuing coaching. I just wanted to share more about this organization specifically
Tim Cynova:
As we bring the plane in for a landing on our conversation today. Where do you want to land it?
Farah Bala:
For anyone who wants to do more, learn more, we have Farsight Friday. When you go to our website, you'll see a tab for it and we are constantly bringing in guests to talk about the topics of our time, which is all infused back to our own mission of building conscious leaders. So if you have a curious about a specific issue or a topic or an identity, go check out some of our episodes. We're in our fourth season right now and see if something piques your curiosity and hopefully you learned something along the way.
Tim Cynova:
It's amazing, Farah. Our time has flown by. Thank you so much for your openness, your insights, your advice, your genuineness. It's always wonderful to connect and thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Farah Bala:
My pleasure.
Tim Cynova:
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