Ed Batista spent 15 years as a Lecturer and Leadership Coach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Ed’s work as a coach began after a 15-year career in management, during which he took two years off to earn an MBA at Stanford and helped launch three new organizations. In addition to his MBA, Ed earned a BA in History, magna cum laude, from Brown University. 

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The Learning Leader Show

  • Commonalities of excellent coaches:
    • Not defensive – Importance of Non-Defensiveness: Leaders who sustain excellence are non-defensive in response to critical feedback, whether it comes from others or from life experiences.
    • Respond well to feedback
    • Continuous Learning – Successful leaders have the ability to learn on their own beyond structured programs. They often create their own learning paths and adapt continuously.
    • Empathetic Listening and Challenging: Effective coaching balances empathetic listening with the ability to challenge clients constructively. Both elements are crucial for meaningful personal and professional growth.
  • Positive Feedback: The importance of providing genuine positive feedback, not just focusing on negative or critical feedback. Positive feedback should be used as a regular part of communication.
  • “Leadership can’t be taught but it can be learned.”
  • Coaching is not therapy, but it can be therapy-adjacent.
    • It’s not telling people what to do and it’s not just asking questions. It’s a combination of all of them.
  • There is ample research on the benefits of writing. It clarifies your thinking.
    • Journaling: Encouraging clients to journal can provide significant benefits. However, it should be personalized and feel intrinsically motivated rather than feeling like an obligation.
  • Feedback is Data: Feedback should be viewed as data containing both signal and noise. Leaders need to discern the valuable insights (signal) from the surrounding bias and emotions (noise).
  • The questions to ask someone who might need an executive coach:
    • Why do you want a coach?
    • Why now?
    • What do you hope to get out of it?
  • Equal Partnership: Establishing an equal partnership dynamic between coach and client is crucial. Both sides should feel they are on equal footing to foster open and effective communication.
  • Specialization in Coaching Choices: Choosing clients who feel responsible for building a culture and have a high sense of ownership in their roles ensures a more productive coaching relationship.
  • What do great leaders do?
    • First, do no harm.
    • Walk the talk.
    • Be an embodiment of the culture.
    • Have high standards
      • Take risks
      • Coach people up
      • Train people
    • “Coaching is accomplishment through others.”
  • “Feedback is not a gift.”
    • Feedback is data. Signal and noise.
      • Signal – Important and good.
      • Noise – Byproduct of someone’s distorted lens.
  • “Praise, Criticism, Praise (PCP) is terrible.” Don’t give the compliment sandwich. It’s disingenuous.
  • How leaders best overcome adversity – The most critical skill is “adaptive capacity…” It’s composed of two primary qualities: the ability to grasp context, and hardiness.
  • Coaching – Asking evocative questions, ensuring the other person feels heard, and actively conveying empathy remain the foundations of coaching.
    • Connect: Establish and renew the interpersonal connection, followed by an open-ended question.
    • Reflect: Having elicited a response, reflect back the essence of the other person’s comments.
    • Direct: Focus their attention on a particular aspect of their response that invites further exploration.
  • Support and Challenge – A client once said, “It feels like you’re always in my corner, but you never hesitate to challenge me.”
  • Master the Playbook, Throw it Away – Coaching involves a continuous and cyclical process of learning, unlearning, and relearning.
  • Power Dynamics – The longer I coach, the more I appreciate and value the work of Jeff Pfeffer, a leading scholar on power. philosopher Ernest Becker: “If you are wrong about power, you don’t get a chance to be right about anything else.”
  • “Meaningful coaching is always an emotionally intimate experience, no matter what’s being discussed. In part this is a function of the context: two people talking directly to each other with no distractions… Intimacy in a coaching relationship also results from a willingness to ‘make the private public’–to share with another person the thoughts and feelings that we usually keep to ourselves… And yet an essential factor that makes such intimacy possible is a clear set of boundaries defining the relationship, which creates an inevitable and necessary sense of distance…”
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Time Stamps

More Learning:

Episode 078: Kat Cole – From Hooters Waitress To President of Cinnabon

Episode 216: Jim Collins — How To Go From Good To Great

Episode #300: AJ & Keith Hawk – How To Instill Work Ethic & Curiosity In Your Children

Episode #303:  General Stanley McChrystal – The New Definition Of Leadership