The Feedback Founders Need to Hear — How to Grow Yourself To Grow The Company

“When I’m coaching founders, I never want us to get too far from the question: ‘What does the business need from you right now?’”

It’s not hard to see why executive coach Alisa Cohn favors this question. It may seem to center strategic thinking, but it’s a deeper exercise in disguise, one that requires founders to identify how the company has changed — and confront the gaps where they may be falling short.

“You can be a successful CEO with all different behaviors and styles. But what’s consistent is the need to change as the company grows,” says Cohn. “If you're a quiet CEO, you might need to bring much stronger and more extroverted communication skills. If you’re more externally focused, you're going to have to focus more internally on culture and organizational issues as the team grows. As the founder, you need to be self-aware enough to realize when the company requires something different from you.”

But self-awareness is a particularly tricky skill for founders, CEOs, and execs to sharpen. In the hazy days of changing business models, experimentation (and hopefully) hypergrowth, it's hard to know if something is working because of the leader’s behavior or in spite of it. At the same time, the faucet of upward feedback also slows to a trickle — as hierarchy takes hold, fewer and fewer feel comfortable challenging the founder’s big ideas, or pointing out their missteps.

And that’s just half the battle. Even if you do manage to surface high-quality feedback and identify your opportunities for growth, implementing change in your day-to-day routine is another matter entirely. The calendar fills up, the hectic pace of startup life takes over, and months go by before you realize you haven’t really moved the personal growth needle. 

Cohn is the perfect person to provide direction here. With nearly 20 years of experience as an executive coach, she’s worked with companies ranging from Etsy, Venmo, and InVision to The Wirecutter, Google and IBM, even counting folks like Tim Ferriss among her client list. To scale the impact of her coaching experience and share lessons learned with more leaders, Cohn penned a great new book, "From Start-Up to Grown-Up," which was released last week.

In this exclusive interview, Cohn opens up her playbooks. From getting better at self-reflection, to encouraging others to give you more feedback — and more crucially, figuring out what to do with it — she shares a practical guide to how founders and early startup employees can scale into the C-Suite leaders they need to become. (We particularly love all the question sets she shares to prompt reflection.)

Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!

-The Review editors

P.S. - If you prefer to listen, the audio of our interview with Cohn is available here. 🎧

Recommended resources:

This read on why you should build a “career portfolio” (not a “career path”)

Front's Mathilde Collin on how maternity leave made her a better leader.

This collection of Notion templates for early-stage startups.

A working Google Doc with a product/market fit "report card."

Kim Scott and Trier Bryant on how to reduce your bias in the workplace.

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