I tend to write a lot about product thinking and B2B products specifically on this blog, but the thing that got me intro writing and sharing originally was management, leadership, and coaching - you can read my greatest hits here (there are some satirical essays in there that I really enjoyed crafting). But leadership mindset and effective coaching are topics on which I think there is lots of quantity of content but not lots of quality. And that’s why I was really excited to have Eric Nehrlich joining for a recent episode of 60 Minute Stories.
Eric is an executive coach who helps leaders have more impact by drawing on his 25 years of experience in the tech industry. He loves to identify and challenge mindsets and habits that hold people back from their next level of leadership. Before becoming a coach, Eric spent 10 years as an engineer and product manager across several startups before joining Google, eventually leading business strategy and operations for the Google Search Ads team for six years as Chief of Staff. He published his first book in 2023, You Have A Choice: Beyond Hard Work to Meaningful Impact, which he wrote to share the principles and mindsets that have helped him and his clients with a wider audience.
After working with 100+ clients over nearly 7 years, Eric was able to distill his core tenets of “leader effectiveness” for our hour-long discussion. This session also had some great (and spicy) audience Q&A! Check out the whole conversation in this video episode. Note the full video is only for paying subscribers, so if you haven’t upgraded yet, you can do so via the link below.
We started by talking about Eric’s experience in “the room where it happens”, and interestingly the audience was split between folks who (a) want to get in that room and (b) are already in that room but need help finding their voice.
The biggest thing Eric focuses on with his exec coaching clients is mindset shift, and in this clip he breaks down the different facets of what that means and why it’s critical to succeeding as a senior leader. A lot of people struggle with it because their identity is tied to doing vs leading. I’ve pointed out this issue before in a post I called typing vs tapping, and at its core it’s about letting go of your IC prime.
You get the work done through other people. And that’s really a mindset shift. It just changes your whole sense of identity, your whole sense of value, your whole sense of what it means to work.
We also get into time management and how the most impactful leaders focus on the things only they can do instead of fixating on minutiae and stepping on the toes of people in their org. When it comes to switching your mode of operation as you start your executive career, you are potentially letting go of 10, 20, even 30 years of identity as a hands-on doer. We touch on the writing of Peter Drucker and one of my favorite books (The Effective Executive), to drive home the need for focused time management. Some of you may even recall my tongue-in-cheek essay The Ineffective Executive.
We then talk about the impetus for change - what is the catalyst for folks who come to Eric for help? Sadly, but not surprisingly, burnout is the most common reason.
The conversation then delved into some real-world issues and hot topics:
psychological safety and the lack thereof limiting true executive effectiveness
executive expectations running into cultural norms and resulting DEI implications
the ambiguous term “executive presence” that gets weaponized in exec hiring
