July 22, 2025 • 22 mins
In this enlightening episode, Yosi Kossowsky, Co-Owner of K-Tor Consulting Services LTD, shares insights on leading high-performing executive teams. If you struggle with coaching executives or fostering collaboration, you won’t want to miss it.
You will discover:
- Why your behavior sets the tone for your executive team
- How to communicate clear expectations to drive performance
- What observations foster growth over critical feedback
This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 5 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz
Yosi Kossowsky is a seasoned executive coach with over 17 years of experience and a background as a Chief Technology Officer and Senior Director of Talent Management. Yosi specializes in leadership development, personal growth, and effective communication, leveraging neuroscience and organizational development principles. He’s helped global leaders navigate complex challenges, build high-performing teams, and drive meaningful change. Get ready to learn actionable strategies to enhance your leadership skills and foster a culture of trust and collaboration.
Want to learn more about Yosi Kossowsky's work? Connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/ykossowsky/
Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:02):
Hello, hello and welcome.
Welcome once again to the Start, Scale and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that growswith you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder.
And today we're going to talk about your executive team.
To reach stage five, to become that chief executive, you have to have an executive team.
(00:23):
Otherwise you're just kind of chief leader and that's a whole different episode.
But as chief executive,
I would argue your most important job really boils down to your ability to lead, develop,coach, and mentor your executives well.
But that's often quite intimidating.
And so if you've been frustrated by an executive's performance, or if you're wonderingwhat you could possibly teach your team, or if you've wished that you could clone that one
(00:49):
who's just crushing it, uh you're gonna really want to hear what our guest has to saytoday.
Today, Yossi Kosalski is here to share with us
Yossi is a seasoned executive coach with over 17 years of experience and a background as achief technology officer and senior director of talent management.
Yossi specializes in leadership development, personal growth, and effective communication,leveraging neuroscience and organizational development principles.
(01:17):
He's helped global leaders to navigate complex challenges, build high performing teams,
and develop meaningful change.
So get ready to learn actionable insights and strategies to enhance your leadership skillsand foster a culture of trust and collaboration.
Yossi, welcome to the show.
So glad you're here.
uh For your work uh at Ktor Consulting, uh a lot of what you do is help to empowerleaders, particularly executives, to achieve peak performance.
(01:45):
Now, we've got a lot of folks listening to the show who are CEOs and many of them areworking very, very hard to
build a strong executive team.
Now, one of the things that's not super clear is what that actually means.
So I'm wondering just kind of definitionally to start off, what are the skills that reallydistinguish high performing executives and not only those skills that got them here, but
(02:14):
the skills that they're gonna need now that they are an executive.
Thanks Scott.
I'm really, really happy to be here.
There's this really interesting challenge, especially if you're in that startup phase andyou're the founder as well as the chief executive about a lot of different movements that
(02:36):
are not necessarily self-evident or obvious.
And ultimately the idea is that in your mindset, this is your role.
You are.
the top dog, you are the decision maker.
You are the center of the environment and, um, the culture, the way things will happen.
(03:00):
So your behavior is going to be their behavior.
Your mindset is going to be their mindset.
Your language choices is going to be their language choices.
And I'm going to be explicit.
If you, you know, you feel that you can.
name call, go off the handle, yell or scream or anything of that, then your team is gonnasay, okay, that's the way it's gonna go.
(03:27):
And what starts to instantaneously create a fracture in the system is when you start tohold your team accountable for behaviors, et cetera, that you don't yourself uh exhibit.
And one of the things that happens that makes this a little more complicated is I've foundthat to be true particularly of bad behaviors, but not explicitly true of good behaviors,
(03:57):
right?
So a lot of folks will struggle and it can be a huge blind spot for a leader because theway that their executives relate to them is positive and appropriate.
but then they go and talk downstream or they work with other leaders and it's like Dr.
Jackal Mr.
Hyde.
And so as a leader, especially those who love to lead by example, why is it not enough tojust lead by example and what do we need to complement?
(04:26):
So no one's a mind reader.
And I go through this all the time.
No one's a mind reader.
And the idea that just because you think you're modeling a behavior or something doesn'tmean that it is gonna by osmosis seep into anybody else.
That that is something that's important to you, that you want people to mimic it or followthat protocol.
(04:55):
to me, there's a two-step process.
One is we need to be really explicit.
We need to set actual expectations.
We need to share with people not only what we're looking for in terms of behavior, speech,cascading messaging, holding people accountable.
We also need to actually talk to people about how would that play out.
(05:18):
So saying to you, Scott, you need to be a better listener means nothing.
Right?
How would you be a better listener?
What do you think you could do?
Well, first of all, how do you currently listen today?
What are, what are the mindsets, the actions you do?
So let's understand your starting point and then let's talk about the, the practicalnuance of the how-to very, very often what messes people up.
(05:45):
it's not only in this realm of, of startups and CEOs, it's pretty much across the board iswe say something, but we don't.
give a description or understand how it's interpreted or understood.
And so to say be strategic, think strategic.
You need to be more patient.
You need to be more curious.
(06:05):
You need to be a better listener.
All of these things are very essentially ambiguous.
And unless we can demonstrate them, oh practice them, role play them together, there'sreally zero chance that anybody else will do them in a way that you might have meant or
intended.
Yeah, yeah.
I want to get back to the second part of the opening question, but actually before I do,um one of the challenges that I've seen, and I'm wondering if you've bumped into this, and
(06:35):
this is particularly for founders, is that many of them have actually never had executiveexperience, right?
They've never worked in a company as big as the one that they founded.
And so they find themselves uh in this mode of having to bring executive leaders aroundthem, but they've never actually been in that role, especially for somebody else before.
(06:57):
And it can be really confusing because you just don't know what it's supposed to looklike.
So I'm wondering again, if we could just simply say for someone who's never been in thatseat before, what does a day, a week, a month, a year look like in the seat of a high
performing executive?
So this is, you Scott, you, you bring up like, guess, like right to the hot point of thechallenge, which is we don't know what we don't know.
(07:24):
And if I've, um, never been in that role before, uh, sometimes I've worked with foundersthat this is their only job.
They, they came out of university and they did their startup and they were thankfullysuccessful.
And they've actually never even had a role model to see what that would look like.
And that is.
(07:45):
I would say there's not one answer.
from, me, it's been either start to talk to the executives that you've hired and ask themfor how have they seen it done before?
Um, give the, you know, let them give you examples of their mentors or their role modelsin the executive space.
(08:06):
How this discussion about what was that behavior, how did that play out?
How was, how did you see that?
Um, you know, happen.
in practice, because again, how do you know what you don't know?
Um, the second is honestly get a coach because that is why we're here.
We're here to, share that experience, bring what we have learned from other leaders, fromourselves as leaders and, and that, and then of course there's workshops and books.
(08:37):
Though honestly, I find those are harder to take from what to do into how to do.
So that would be the way I would think about it.
Yeah.
when it comes to tying a couple of these ideas together, when it comes to coaching theseexecutives on our team, again, if we've never been in that role or for whatever reason, it
(09:00):
can be intimidating, right?
Especially for a founder, maybe they've brought in, you know, they've kind of got thebring in great people and then stay out of their way uh kind of approach.
And again, there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
But
it can lead us to kind of be in like, I don't know what to do with my hands.
Like they're here, like hopefully it works.
I don't know if it will work.
(09:22):
And that's just not a great place for most founders to be.
what does an active role in leading and developing an executive team look like?
I'm gonna say something and I think that it's kind of self-evident.
It's communication.
And what I mean though by communication is...
(09:45):
put out questions, be really, really curious.
And one of our challenges with curiosity is that we all at some level face perceptionbiases, confirmation biases, meaning that we are really good about hearing what we want to
hear or what we expect to hear.
(10:06):
We're not really good about hearing what we don't want to hear or not expect to hear.
And, you know, when you've not done this before, when you've not led
Ultimately, our humanity is fantastic if we really tap into it, if we are sitting thereand willing to have a conversation, an open conversation to let, let's change the idea of
(10:26):
feedback to observations.
So the idea of observation is, Scott, when you were in that meeting today, I observed, youknow, you doing this and this is how I experienced it rather than Scott, what you did was
not good.
That's not helpful.
It triggers us.
If we can.
move to a space of as a team, sharing observations with each other, helping us understandhow we were experienced, then that is, I have really found that to be a really strong,
(10:55):
powerful way to grow as a team, regardless of the title that we're playing with.
Yeah, I love that.
I love that.
Now, for uh executives in particular, there's a lot riding on their ability to havesuccess through others.
But one of the things that can happen is we can rise to that level of authority or thatposition inside of an organization very much on the merit of what we knew and
(11:26):
accomplished, uh you know, either directly or as part of a team.
How do you help executives, maybe any executives listening, to kind of shift that mindsetfrom maybe an I first mindset to a we first mindset?
So the first thing I try to instill in the people that I work with is a mantra.
(11:49):
And I don't know if my language is gonna be okay.
ah But the mantra is, what if I don't know shit?
And when we go into any situation thinking we know the answer, we've got this, as you say,what got me here is gonna get me there.
It limits our ability to think outside of that.
(12:10):
The whole brain is gonna be cycled.
uh
are focused on confirmation.
the first is what if I don't know shit?
And that mantra then hopefully leads us to being more open to hearing and seeing.
And again, ultimately, I don't think there is the way to be successful.
(12:30):
There's not the way to scale from uh startup one to two to three, right?
There's you finding your way, your team's finding their way.
And
The danger is when we stop listening, when we stop being curious, and these are words thatare ambiguous.
So it's really about how do I listen?
How do I watch out for that ambiguity?
(12:51):
How do I watch out when I'm being stubborn?
ah And so, you know, there's, there's cute games where we set up like a financial paymentsystem.
So we, there's, you know, anytime that, that any of the group says something that we say,that's not going to be helpful.
Then you put a dollar out into the bin.
Um, and to the community chest type of thing.
(13:12):
And you work with each other on that.
We all have the right to support each other, to share our observations, to raise a flag.
And that doesn't mean we're not going to lose it.
We're not going to have short patients.
means that this is our agreement and, and we need to remind ourselves of it constantly andbe able to.
(13:40):
hold each other accountable to it.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a lot more fun.
It's a lot more challenging, but it's a lot more fun to do that in a team environment.
I love that there's a subtle undertone to that response that I think is really powerful.
Now, uh when we're thinking about an executive and helping them develop, sometimes itmakes sense to go to the outside and ask for help from outside the organization.
(14:08):
uh
When's the right time to do that?
Do you wait until somebody's in trouble?
Are there things that you can do in advance?
uh As someone who does this for a living, helping in many ways from the outside, when'sthe opportune time to bring in coaching for your executives?
So the way I think about it is when you start to notice certain road signs or flags.
(14:36):
So for example, if the same behaviors or leadership challenges keep on resurfacing overand over again, you've had conversations, maybe you even send some people to training and
yet you're finding that things aren't shifting.
That's a great time to bring somebody in.
who can have a one-on-one or team conversation.
(15:00):
If you start to notice that there's decision bottlenecks uh or emotional play outs thatnow are becoming systemic, then again, to bring somebody in who can be an observer role,
who can help everybody see things from another point of view, see our blind spots, uh orwhen you're finding that...
(15:21):
uh
Either that it's very, hard for a leader to play uh leader and uh facilitator.
And so when you're finding that you're trying to play both roles to get you and your teamgoing together, because if you are going to play the role of facilitator, you are
(15:45):
essentially putting yourself outside the team.
And so often these founders think, I can do both.
And I would say in my experience, and I'd love to hear your Scott, that you really can'tdo both.
And so again, when you're trying to facilitate and lead, just take the leadership role soyou're part of the team and let someone else come in and help facilitate.
(16:05):
I love that even just as a mental model that yes, being a facilitator, I would say theadvantage that I have is that I am outside the team.
And like coming from a background of being in the meetings and being with teams, it's aconstant battle for me to not cross that line and get into the team, right?
Which actually removes the benefit.
And I love that idea that if you are facilitating, you have placed yourself outside theteam.
(16:30):
I've never heard it explained that clearly because it's so true, right?
It's almost schizophrenic throughout the day.
You're trying to move the conversation along.
You're trying to contribute.
You're trying to make space for others.
And what I think a lot of folks don't recognize is your body language as CEO, right, asthe one in charge is such a big part of that process.
(16:54):
And so when you're facilitating and even if you're just thinking, right, uh
play music at our church and I can't call myself a musician, that would be unfair tomusicians, but you get this like stank face when you like, you get the right sound and
leaders do that as well.
Like they might be coming up with a great idea, they might be really frustrated by an ideaand it looks exactly the same.
(17:18):
But if you're also the facilitator, how's the room supposed to read that?
So I love that you're putting yourself outside of the room.
I think that's such an important uh and helpful point.
I got that wrong for a long time, a really long time.
It wasn't, and for most folks I say, just try it, right?
If you've never done it, you have no idea what it feels like.
(17:39):
So brilliant, simple way of thinking about that.
So Yossi, I've got this question that I ask all my guests.
I'm very interested to see what you have to say.
So the question's this, what is the biggest secret that you wish wasn't a secret at all?
What's that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
(17:59):
So I don't actually think it's a secret, but I think that people don't realize the impact.
And that is that we all have subjective perception.
And subjective perception means that I have been talking or Scott, you've been talking,but you don't know how I am hearing and interpreting and understanding anything that
(18:20):
you're saying and vice versa.
And our biggest failure I find is the fact that we will say things, we will say, Hey, anyquestions?
Do you understand?
You got it?
And that is not checking for understanding.
That is just wanting to hear the answer.
Yes.
If we truly could take into our system that every time I am speaking, it does not meananybody understands me.
(18:49):
What would I have to do differently to make sure I am understood in the way I want it tobe?
And vice versa when I am listening and
I know that I'm not hearing it the way that the other person or the other people aresaying, what do I need to do to make sure I understand them?
To me that if we could do that, I think it would shift so much misunderstanding, so muchconflict and frustration.
(19:15):
Yeah, so good, so good.
Yossi, there's some folks listening to this and oh they want help with their team.
They want someone to help facilitate any number of different ways that they could get someoutside support to really take their executives to the next level.
They want to learn more about you and your firm.
Tell us where they can find out more.
So right now it's LinkedIn, honestly, I've got a webpage, it's in motion.
(19:42):
The best way is LinkedIn and it's I'm sure you'll put my LinkedIn into the show notes.
ah That's the best way there is even a button there to schedule time with me so we canhave, you know, uh a non obligatory conversation just to hear each other out.
But that's the best way.
Thank you.
fantastic.
Well, Yossi, thanks for being on the show.
(20:03):
It's just a privilege and honor having you here today.
Loved this conversation.
uh Super, super helpful.
And for those of you watching and listening, I hope you enjoyed this conversation as muchas I know I did.
And I cannot wait to see you next time.
Take care.
Hello, hello and welcome.
Welcome once again to the Start, Scale and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that growswith you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder.
And today we're going to talk about your executive team.
To reach stage five, to become that chief executive, you have to have an executive team.
(00:23):
Otherwise you're just kind of chief leader and that's a whole different episode.
But as chief executive,
I would argue your most important job really boils down to your ability to lead, develop,coach, and mentor your executives well.
But that's often quite intimidating.
And so if you've been frustrated by an executive's performance, or if you're wonderingwhat you could possibly teach your team, or if you've wished that you could clone that one
(00:49):
who's just crushing it, uh you're gonna really want to hear what our guest has to saytoday.
Today, Yossi Kosalski is here to share with us
Yossi is a seasoned executive coach with over 17 years of experience and a background as achief technology officer and senior director of talent management.
Yossi specializes in leadership development, personal growth, and effective communication,leveraging neuroscience and organizational development principles.
(01:17):
He's helped global leaders to navigate complex challenges, build high performing teams,
and develop meaningful change.
So get ready to learn actionable insights and strategies to enhance your leadership skillsand foster a culture of trust and collaboration.
Yossi, welcome to the show.
So glad you're here.
uh For your work uh at Ktor Consulting, uh a lot of what you do is help to empowerleaders, particularly executives, to achieve peak performance.
(01:45):
Now, we've got a lot of folks listening to the show who are CEOs and many of them areworking very, very hard to
build a strong executive team.
Now, one of the things that's not super clear is what that actually means.
So I'm wondering just kind of definitionally to start off, what are the skills that reallydistinguish high performing executives and not only those skills that got them here, but
(02:14):
the skills that they're gonna need now that they are an executive.
Thanks Scott.
I'm really, really happy to be here.
There's this really interesting challenge, especially if you're in that startup phase andyou're the founder as well as the chief executive about a lot of different movements that
(02:36):
are not necessarily self-evident or obvious.
And ultimately the idea is that in your mindset, this is your role.
You are.
the top dog, you are the decision maker.
You are the center of the environment and, um, the culture, the way things will happen.
(03:00):
So your behavior is going to be their behavior.
Your mindset is going to be their mindset.
Your language choices is going to be their language choices.
And I'm going to be explicit.
If you, you know, you feel that you can.
name call, go off the handle, yell or scream or anything of that, then your team is gonnasay, okay, that's the way it's gonna go.
(03:27):
And what starts to instantaneously create a fracture in the system is when you start tohold your team accountable for behaviors, et cetera, that you don't yourself uh exhibit.
And one of the things that happens that makes this a little more complicated is I've foundthat to be true particularly of bad behaviors, but not explicitly true of good behaviors,
(03:57):
right?
So a lot of folks will struggle and it can be a huge blind spot for a leader because theway that their executives relate to them is positive and appropriate.
but then they go and talk downstream or they work with other leaders and it's like Dr.
Jackal Mr.
Hyde.
And so as a leader, especially those who love to lead by example, why is it not enough tojust lead by example and what do we need to complement?
(04:26):
So no one's a mind reader.
And I go through this all the time.
No one's a mind reader.
And the idea that just because you think you're modeling a behavior or something doesn'tmean that it is gonna by osmosis seep into anybody else.
That that is something that's important to you, that you want people to mimic it or followthat protocol.
(04:55):
to me, there's a two-step process.
One is we need to be really explicit.
We need to set actual expectations.
We need to share with people not only what we're looking for in terms of behavior, speech,cascading messaging, holding people accountable.
We also need to actually talk to people about how would that play out.
(05:18):
So saying to you, Scott, you need to be a better listener means nothing.
Right?
How would you be a better listener?
What do you think you could do?
Well, first of all, how do you currently listen today?
What are, what are the mindsets, the actions you do?
So let's understand your starting point and then let's talk about the, the practicalnuance of the how-to very, very often what messes people up.
(05:45):
it's not only in this realm of, of startups and CEOs, it's pretty much across the board iswe say something, but we don't.
give a description or understand how it's interpreted or understood.
And so to say be strategic, think strategic.
You need to be more patient.
You need to be more curious.
(06:05):
You need to be a better listener.
All of these things are very essentially ambiguous.
And unless we can demonstrate them, oh practice them, role play them together, there'sreally zero chance that anybody else will do them in a way that you might have meant or
intended.
Yeah, yeah.
I want to get back to the second part of the opening question, but actually before I do,um one of the challenges that I've seen, and I'm wondering if you've bumped into this, and
(06:35):
this is particularly for founders, is that many of them have actually never had executiveexperience, right?
They've never worked in a company as big as the one that they founded.
And so they find themselves uh in this mode of having to bring executive leaders aroundthem, but they've never actually been in that role, especially for somebody else before.
(06:57):
And it can be really confusing because you just don't know what it's supposed to looklike.
So I'm wondering again, if we could just simply say for someone who's never been in thatseat before, what does a day, a week, a month, a year look like in the seat of a high
performing executive?
So this is, you Scott, you, you bring up like, guess, like right to the hot point of thechallenge, which is we don't know what we don't know.
(07:24):
And if I've, um, never been in that role before, uh, sometimes I've worked with foundersthat this is their only job.
They, they came out of university and they did their startup and they were thankfullysuccessful.
And they've actually never even had a role model to see what that would look like.
And that is.
(07:45):
I would say there's not one answer.
from, me, it's been either start to talk to the executives that you've hired and ask themfor how have they seen it done before?
Um, give the, you know, let them give you examples of their mentors or their role modelsin the executive space.
(08:06):
How this discussion about what was that behavior, how did that play out?
How was, how did you see that?
Um, you know, happen.
in practice, because again, how do you know what you don't know?
Um, the second is honestly get a coach because that is why we're here.
We're here to, share that experience, bring what we have learned from other leaders, fromourselves as leaders and, and that, and then of course there's workshops and books.
(08:37):
Though honestly, I find those are harder to take from what to do into how to do.
So that would be the way I would think about it.
Yeah.
when it comes to tying a couple of these ideas together, when it comes to coaching theseexecutives on our team, again, if we've never been in that role or for whatever reason, it
(09:00):
can be intimidating, right?
Especially for a founder, maybe they've brought in, you know, they've kind of got thebring in great people and then stay out of their way uh kind of approach.
And again, there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
But
it can lead us to kind of be in like, I don't know what to do with my hands.
Like they're here, like hopefully it works.
I don't know if it will work.
(09:22):
And that's just not a great place for most founders to be.
what does an active role in leading and developing an executive team look like?
I'm gonna say something and I think that it's kind of self-evident.
It's communication.
And what I mean though by communication is...
(09:45):
put out questions, be really, really curious.
And one of our challenges with curiosity is that we all at some level face perceptionbiases, confirmation biases, meaning that we are really good about hearing what we want to
hear or what we expect to hear.
(10:06):
We're not really good about hearing what we don't want to hear or not expect to hear.
And, you know, when you've not done this before, when you've not led
Ultimately, our humanity is fantastic if we really tap into it, if we are sitting thereand willing to have a conversation, an open conversation to let, let's change the idea of
(10:26):
feedback to observations.
So the idea of observation is, Scott, when you were in that meeting today, I observed, youknow, you doing this and this is how I experienced it rather than Scott, what you did was
not good.
That's not helpful.
It triggers us.
If we can.
move to a space of as a team, sharing observations with each other, helping us understandhow we were experienced, then that is, I have really found that to be a really strong,
(10:55):
powerful way to grow as a team, regardless of the title that we're playing with.
Yeah, I love that.
I love that.
Now, for uh executives in particular, there's a lot riding on their ability to havesuccess through others.
But one of the things that can happen is we can rise to that level of authority or thatposition inside of an organization very much on the merit of what we knew and
(11:26):
accomplished, uh you know, either directly or as part of a team.
How do you help executives, maybe any executives listening, to kind of shift that mindsetfrom maybe an I first mindset to a we first mindset?
So the first thing I try to instill in the people that I work with is a mantra.
(11:49):
And I don't know if my language is gonna be okay.
ah But the mantra is, what if I don't know shit?
And when we go into any situation thinking we know the answer, we've got this, as you say,what got me here is gonna get me there.
It limits our ability to think outside of that.
(12:10):
The whole brain is gonna be cycled.
uh
are focused on confirmation.
the first is what if I don't know shit?
And that mantra then hopefully leads us to being more open to hearing and seeing.
And again, ultimately, I don't think there is the way to be successful.
(12:30):
There's not the way to scale from uh startup one to two to three, right?
There's you finding your way, your team's finding their way.
And
The danger is when we stop listening, when we stop being curious, and these are words thatare ambiguous.
So it's really about how do I listen?
How do I watch out for that ambiguity?
(12:51):
How do I watch out when I'm being stubborn?
ah And so, you know, there's, there's cute games where we set up like a financial paymentsystem.
So we, there's, you know, anytime that, that any of the group says something that we say,that's not going to be helpful.
Then you put a dollar out into the bin.
Um, and to the community chest type of thing.
(13:12):
And you work with each other on that.
We all have the right to support each other, to share our observations, to raise a flag.
And that doesn't mean we're not going to lose it.
We're not going to have short patients.
means that this is our agreement and, and we need to remind ourselves of it constantly andbe able to.
(13:40):
hold each other accountable to it.
Yeah, yeah.
It's a lot more fun.
It's a lot more challenging, but it's a lot more fun to do that in a team environment.
I love that there's a subtle undertone to that response that I think is really powerful.
Now, uh when we're thinking about an executive and helping them develop, sometimes itmakes sense to go to the outside and ask for help from outside the organization.
(14:08):
uh
When's the right time to do that?
Do you wait until somebody's in trouble?
Are there things that you can do in advance?
uh As someone who does this for a living, helping in many ways from the outside, when'sthe opportune time to bring in coaching for your executives?
So the way I think about it is when you start to notice certain road signs or flags.
(14:36):
So for example, if the same behaviors or leadership challenges keep on resurfacing overand over again, you've had conversations, maybe you even send some people to training and
yet you're finding that things aren't shifting.
That's a great time to bring somebody in.
who can have a one-on-one or team conversation.
(15:00):
If you start to notice that there's decision bottlenecks uh or emotional play outs thatnow are becoming systemic, then again, to bring somebody in who can be an observer role,
who can help everybody see things from another point of view, see our blind spots, uh orwhen you're finding that...
(15:21):
uh
Either that it's very, hard for a leader to play uh leader and uh facilitator.
And so when you're finding that you're trying to play both roles to get you and your teamgoing together, because if you are going to play the role of facilitator, you are
(15:45):
essentially putting yourself outside the team.
And so often these founders think, I can do both.
And I would say in my experience, and I'd love to hear your Scott, that you really can'tdo both.
And so again, when you're trying to facilitate and lead, just take the leadership role soyou're part of the team and let someone else come in and help facilitate.
(16:05):
I love that even just as a mental model that yes, being a facilitator, I would say theadvantage that I have is that I am outside the team.
And like coming from a background of being in the meetings and being with teams, it's aconstant battle for me to not cross that line and get into the team, right?
Which actually removes the benefit.
And I love that idea that if you are facilitating, you have placed yourself outside theteam.
(16:30):
I've never heard it explained that clearly because it's so true, right?
It's almost schizophrenic throughout the day.
You're trying to move the conversation along.
You're trying to contribute.
You're trying to make space for others.
And what I think a lot of folks don't recognize is your body language as CEO, right, asthe one in charge is such a big part of that process.
(16:54):
And so when you're facilitating and even if you're just thinking, right, uh
play music at our church and I can't call myself a musician, that would be unfair tomusicians, but you get this like stank face when you like, you get the right sound and
leaders do that as well.
Like they might be coming up with a great idea, they might be really frustrated by an ideaand it looks exactly the same.
(17:18):
But if you're also the facilitator, how's the room supposed to read that?
So I love that you're putting yourself outside of the room.
I think that's such an important uh and helpful point.
I got that wrong for a long time, a really long time.
It wasn't, and for most folks I say, just try it, right?
If you've never done it, you have no idea what it feels like.
(17:39):
So brilliant, simple way of thinking about that.
So Yossi, I've got this question that I ask all my guests.
I'm very interested to see what you have to say.
So the question's this, what is the biggest secret that you wish wasn't a secret at all?
What's that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?
(17:59):
So I don't actually think it's a secret, but I think that people don't realize the impact.
And that is that we all have subjective perception.
And subjective perception means that I have been talking or Scott, you've been talking,but you don't know how I am hearing and interpreting and understanding anything that
(18:20):
you're saying and vice versa.
And our biggest failure I find is the fact that we will say things, we will say, Hey, anyquestions?
Do you understand?
You got it?
And that is not checking for understanding.
That is just wanting to hear the answer.
Yes.
If we truly could take into our system that every time I am speaking, it does not meananybody understands me.
(18:49):
What would I have to do differently to make sure I am understood in the way I want it tobe?
And vice versa when I am listening and
I know that I'm not hearing it the way that the other person or the other people aresaying, what do I need to do to make sure I understand them?
To me that if we could do that, I think it would shift so much misunderstanding, so muchconflict and frustration.
(19:15):
Yeah, so good, so good.
Yossi, there's some folks listening to this and oh they want help with their team.
They want someone to help facilitate any number of different ways that they could get someoutside support to really take their executives to the next level.
They want to learn more about you and your firm.
Tell us where they can find out more.
So right now it's LinkedIn, honestly, I've got a webpage, it's in motion.
(19:42):
The best way is LinkedIn and it's I'm sure you'll put my LinkedIn into the show notes.
ah That's the best way there is even a button there to schedule time with me so we canhave, you know, uh a non obligatory conversation just to hear each other out.
But that's the best way.
Thank you.
fantastic.
Well, Yossi, thanks for being on the show.
(20:03):
It's just a privilege and honor having you here today.
Loved this conversation.
uh Super, super helpful.
And for those of you watching and listening, I hope you enjoyed this conversation as muchas I know I did.
And I cannot wait to see you next time.
Take care.
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