Brian Underhill - Coach Me! Your Personal Board of Directors: Leadership Advice from the World’s Greatest Coaches

Edited by

Brian Underhill

Jonathan Passmore

Marshall Goldsmith

This edition first published 2022

2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

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Paperback ISBN: 9781119823780; ePub ISBN: 9781119823797; Obook ISBN: 9781119823803.

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Profits from the sale of Coach Me! Your Personal Board of Directors will be provided to the Marshall Goldsmith Bursary at Henley Business School, United Kingdom, which is a special fund dedicated to training the next generation of worthy leaders from the developing world to become coaches.

To my beautiful wife, Julie. Eccl 4:12. BU

To Katharine, Florence, and Beatrice. JP

1. Chapter 2
2. Chapter 5
3. Chapter 11
4. Chapter 24
5. Chapter 31
6. Chapter 38
7. Chapter 40
8. Chapter 45
9. Chapter 47

1. Chapter 17

Aicha Evans
CEO, Zoox, Inc.

Mark Thompson
Worlds #1 CEO Coach

When you meet world-class leaders whose talent is as extraordinary as that of Aicha Evans, you might not imagine her looking to executive coaches to be inspired and supported. However, throughout her remarkable career, she has tapped master coaches as strategic partners in building every great team, particularly in organizations facing massive growth and change. As CEO of Zoox, an Amazon company, Aicha is leading a mission as epic as a technological moonshot autonomous driving a radical redefinition of personal transportation to make it safer, cleaner and more enjoyable for everyone, she says.

My job, first and foremost, is to coach my team to become better leaders! And the biggest challenge every leader faces is to make yourself vulnerable to coaching as a role model of professional growth and personal transformation, Aicha smiled: When it comes to change, you go first!

As a CEO coach, Aichas journey reminds me just how fortunate I am to learn from and support the worlds most talented leaders. My mentor and friend Alan Mulally, the legendary former CEO of Ford and Boeing, often reminds me: The secret to success as a coach is client selection! When Marshall Goldsmith and I first met Aicha, we realized she was among the most gifted and compassionate technology leaders we would ever serve.

Whenever Aicha is challenged to break new ground or make change happen, your first step must be to look in the mirror. You have to find your own growth story and help your team cross the chasm, cascading a culture of coaching throughout your organization, she said. As youre promoted, your role as a leader obviously becomes less and less as commander and director, and more about coaching and cheerleading, she insists.

Growing up in Senegal, West Africa, from the very beginning I thought I was going to be a fighter pilot, Evans said. By the time I got to Paris as a student and bounced between Africa and Europe, I knew I wanted to be a technologist. Her passion revealed itself as she found herself compelled to disassemble and reassemble every electronic device in the house. As a teenager, her parents attempted to put a stop to her long-distance phone calls, which were racking up high international charges. At the time, phones had a dial, which her parents locked, but Aicha found a hack to run the dial tone code on the phoneline and continue her international calls anyway. By the time I arrived in the US for college, she mused, it was obvious to me that Id be focusing on computers!

At Intel, the worlds largest semiconductor chip company, I learned about ones responsibility as a technologist when it comes to society. I learned to be a leader at scale, to deal with press and media and investors. More importantly, I learned how to focus on people, but at a really massive scale, and coaching plays a big role in making that happen faster and better. Aicha believes that her focus on coaching individual executives and teams helped me do really well at Intel. I was enjoying it and felt that I was working on something important.