Metis Coaching: Alignment, Aliveness, and the Ceaseless Annihilation of BS

TL;DR Scaling a truly great company demands alignment across your inner and outer worlds; when these are out of alignment you and your business get stuck. Coaching at its best helps this happen.

Some founders swear by coaches, others think they’re nonsense. I can’t speak to the category as a whole because it’s basically made up - there seem to be about as many definitions as there are for “leadership” or “product management.” But I believe in what we do at Studio Metis, and if you’re considering coaching, I want to tell you about the version that I think works.

Building anything with other people is one of the hardest things you can do. You have to sell people on a vision that doesn’t yet exist, but must respond deftly to reality. Everyone looks to you for the answer, but then seem to often misinterpret or reject it. You must fend off competitors, while staying focused on your own path to excellence. You have to manage constant tradeoffs, each with their own potentially catastrophic risks, while keeping things simple and optimistic. You have to surround yourself with excellent people you trust, but there’s always a gap to fill on one or both of those measures. Culture, strategy, execution, budget, hiring, management all come to reflect back to us a 1000 times over the places in ourselves that are most aligned or misaligned with what the moment demands. 

Doing all of this well isn’t simply a matter of skill – it means being clear about what matters and retaining faith in it without falling prey to the many variants of BS that get mistaken for clarity. This takes many forms –  attachment to who you think you should be rather than who you are, getting enamored with future plans going “just so” while ignoring all feedback to the contrary, stacking bets to avoid fears about your real product, figuring out clever ways to postpone decisions in order to avoid conflict, etc. You are the easiest person to fool with these narratives, very few people will tell you otherwise, and your choices have the biggest impact on the future of your company. This is part of why having an external coach helps.

Many coaches, steeped in the tradition of human potential, treat the inner work as primary, and the outer realities of strategy, funding, management and org as secondary. Others, often coming from their own business success or consulting, do the opposite, acting more like mentors. I believe both these approaches to be insufficient. The flow of a great business will be blocked in different places at different times. To put it bluntly - you can’t introspect someone out of a bad strategy or dysfunctional team, nor can a strategy or design really work that doesn’t grow in parallel with a CEO’s own unfolding. The energy in the system will be blocked or expressed destructively in all these areas in parallel, as each reflects the other. It is only by holding the whole, and treating the whole as worthy of attention, that potential is expressed. 

Coaching is the art of fostering that alignment. This has many parts: 

- We must sort true ambition from what we think we should want, facing with honesty what really drives us and have the courage to center that in our work, rather than merely responding to the next fire.

- We must crystallize what the world is calling from us and map it to the concrete demands of budget and strategy, staying true to the core of the value we are creating without giving into the temptation to cast about for options to de-risk a foundationally risky venture.

- We must find the minimum viable structure that enables the people around us to drive towards that vision, crafting an org that is “fit for purpose” at each stage of its development. 

- We must seek to get closer to reality everyday, sifting through day-to-day challenges for clues to where the energy in the business is getting stuck, cutting through the sophisticated bullshit we concoct to avoid facing the harder questions and choices that true greatness demands.

The Metis approach to coaching is about taking on all these pieces together. What’s needed to take you and your business to the next level is never “one thing”; it’s a constant practice of finding the right leverage point. 

Driving this alignment through the “fog of war” takes a special kind of relationship. The decisions that will matter most will come at you when you are least able to see them clearly –  when your big client is lost, when your raise fails, when it becomes clear you don’t have the product-market fit you thought you had, when you must fire your dearest friend (sometimes all at the same time).

In those moments you need someone who is committed above all to what is great in you, without reference to their place on the cap table or position in the org. You need someone who’s going to amplify the signal you would prefer to ignore. You need someone who loves your potential more than your comfort, to whom you can be completely honest without worrying about how you’ll be received. That is the relationship real alignment requires, and what coaching is meant to be. 

When you get these pieces aligned - what the world wants, what drives you personally, the org designed to deliver it, and a clear view on what needs to be done next - your business comes alive. If you’ve made it this far in your journey as a founder you’ve experienced these moments of flow at least once or twice. This is when your decisions actually translate into action. This is when the big contracts come in. This is when the team is jamming, and see you actually get to see the feedback loops between hard work and meaningful results. Like a bird of prey finding an updraft, you don’t soar by flapping your wings so much as getting yourself to the right place at the right time. A great coach is your partner in creating this state of aliveness, and finding it, again and again.