Breakthrough Coaching Without The Bullsh*t

I first met Angela Parker back when I was helping launch Hampton (the curated peer group for high-growth founders).

She was one of the expert facilitators we paid to run group meetings, and while they were all talented, she quickly developed a special reputation as one of the best at not just keeping, but commanding, the full attention of a half-dozen wily and overworked entrepreneurs for hours at a time… via Zoom.

Angela took no shit, and founders loved it.

“My north star has always been to be the – capital ‘T’ – most in-demand coach and facilitator in the country,” she told me. And in many ways, she’s accomplished that.

“I get into the biggest rooms, I get the biggest jobs, and I’m known for exactly what my intention is to be known for – which is to create breakthroughs for high performers and their teams.”

That skill doesn’t come cheap.

Companies typically pay her $25k per day or more to work with their people at corporate off-sites and retreats. And that’s before hotel bills and the flight in from the Italian mountains, where she’s lived ever since selling her prior company in 2018.

Now, making game-changing money is great. And she’s thrilled that billion-dollar companies have an active interest in helping their execs explore their personal and professional values (which was not always the case).

But there was an issue – charging top dollar meant that she continually had to say no to smaller companies she really wanted to work with. In helping mega-companies clarify their values, she found herself out of alignment with her own. 

So she sat down with her team to design a solution.

“We had a session where we asked ourselves what would it look like to have a one-day workshop that was affordable,” she said. “That would allow me to have a great values alignment between teaching the work I love, still making top dollar, but creating something that allowed people to experience this work in a different way.”

The answer was her new Re/Set Workshop – a series of one-day sessions with fixed tour dates, designed to help clarify exactly what your team is working towards, get everybody moving in the same direction, and most importantly, make it clear how the company’s goals will unlock their own personal and professional ambitions for the year ahead.

Eight hours isn’t a long time to strategize for an entire year, so I caught up with her recently to find out how she thinks about crafting breakthrough experiences on such a tight timeline.

Turns out it starts with a total flip of the script.

“What I have not loved about a lot of workshops that I've seen other people do is it feels like you're being handed Kool Aid,” she said. “And you are there to drink the Kool Aid.”

Not in this case.

“We start this day allowing every individual on that team to have a couple hours of personal reflection,” she said. 

Direct reports essentially get a couple hours of executive-level coaching before they ever talk about the company or its goals.

“How has their year been as a person? What's gone well? What's gone bad?... Where did they grow? Where did they stall? Where did they fuck up? What were the big wins and the fails?”

“We go through a variety of exercises,” Angela said. “They have a really gorgeous journal and they have the opportunity to just down-regulate and start to think about themselves. It's incredibly vulnerable and safe.”

“We don't tell people it's going to be vulnerable,” she added. “We don't do that. We just model it in the room and people get space to reflect on some questions and share.”

This is one of the areas where I find Angela consistently sets herself apart – her ability to create an experience people don’t consciously realize they’re having.

As we spoke, her eyes lit up talking about the nuance of accommodating different learning styles, moving people through a transformation quickly, or even how subtle things like body position – a leader standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the team, rather than face-to-face – create a different experience overall.

Done right, the end effect is that leaders start the day looking awesome because they’ve given this gift of time to the rest of the team.

A bit counterintuitive, perhaps. But focusing on teammates’ personal goals, rather than company goals, sets the company up for more success later.

“When people come into a company, and come into a role, and contribute to a team, and help develop a product, based on what's really important to them,” Angela said, “they are aligning their personal North Star and their personal value to the company. Which means they not only put in better work, they stay longer.”

This is the key to the day’s transformative power. Starting right sets a tone that can carry through the upcoming year and beyond.

Next, the team goes through an exercise to get crystal clear on the strengths and weaknesses of the team as a whole, and makes a plan for how to kill the weaknesses off.

They do this with a special visual exercise – designed to make people much more comfortable surfacing problems and exploring blind spots that event the leaders may have missed.

Notice we still haven’t gotten to company goals – we’re building to that.

Every member of the team gets clarity around which of the strengths and weaknesses they contribute to, and how, and because the whole conversation was grounded first in their personal and professional goals, there’s a much more powerful driver to change.

“And so, before you even go to lunch, every person has a personal North Star, [and] a professional North Star,” she said. “You are aware of the strengths of the team, the weaknesses of a team, and you already have the plan for how you can solve those weaknesses.”

Only then does the conversation shift to the company’s north star. 

“Often this is something that the CEO or the founder already has in place,” she said. 

“We figure out exactly what everyone on the team needs to be doing and owning in order to achieve that North Star. We come up with solutions for problems that may occur along the pathway. So we already have a plan and then we allow people to create their exact next steps that they need to do. And it's completely comprehensive.”

Now, one of the keys to transformation is the facing of difficult truths, and there are two that groups undergoing this workshop tend to grapple with.

The first is related to the leader, and the natural challenges they face getting honest feedback from the team. Their blind spots.

“This is why you bring in a professional facilitator,” Angela said. “If the leader is in the front of the room, they're going to be served up one piece of data. When I'm in the front of the room and the leader is shoulder to shoulder [with others], people feel more comfortable sending information up to the front.”

The other uncomfortable truth, she says, is that people start to see the ways in which they’re getting in their own way.

“But instead of just looking at the shit that they’re doing that’s blocking them,” she says. “I have set up their neural pathways in the beginning part of the day to be excited about where they want to go.”

This focus on destination-over-everything is a crucial part of the formula, she says. Too many people get stuck thinking about, How do I get to the next step?

“That question will fuck your brain every time,” she said. “It’s not about asking yourself How?; It’s about  asking yourself What do I want?”

If you can be really clear about what you want, she says, you will figure out the how.

“So the uncomfortable truth for people on the team is they start to get really clear that they are getting in their own way. But they’re only getting in their own way because they weren’t clear about what they wanted.”

And this is why the day starts with personal north star.

It forces clarity, and very quickly, people see new opportunities to get what they want personally by grabbing responsibility within the team. 

“That’s why there’s such an awakening in these experiences,” she said. “Because those uncomfortable things give them clarity before they have time to realize they’re uncomfortable.”

You can connect with Angela or read more about her work on her website, and you can learn more about Reset Alignment Workshop or schedule yours here.