Christina Sass

Coaching in the Clear

Christina Sass:

Yes, coaching is hard, but if you're coming to coaching with real shit, it's already hard. You know, like you're already not loving the situation and so you can do it feeling like you're developing new tools with which to do it. Or you can, you know, give up or decide that those are the only tools you want to use.

Jeff Hunter:

Hi and welcome. I'm Jeff Hunter and you are listening to coaching in the clear, the podcast committed to help you learn about coaching. We're going to help you better understand the value and application of coaching by having in-depth conversations with the people who use coaches to unleash their potential; The founders, leaders and managers who are shaping our world. Coaching is more popular than ever. And we believe that sharing in-depth personal conversations about coaching experiences is the best way for you to learn whether coaching is for you and how you can get the most out of your coaching practice. We are especially interested in how people use coaching to unleash their potential while creating market-leading big change businesses. Coaching in the clear is a production of Talentism, a business dedicated to helping the world's most ambitious leaders achieve their ultimate goals by systematically turning confusion into clarity.

We send out a weekly newsletter called the Sensemaker where we offer our latest thinking about issues affecting big change companies and their leaders, as well as provide other helpful content, to enable you to unleash your potential, learn more and sign up at Talentism.com. Today I'm speaking with Christina Sass. I think Christina stands as a shining example of someone turning their compulsion into a lifelong career, into someone finding their calling. She held high ranks at some of the largest global nonprofits and worked closely with Hillary Clinton's office as an advisor, helping build solutions to some of the most pressing challenges in international relations. After amassing nearly 15 years of experience in those fields, she co founded in Andela, a company dedicated to the proposition that brilliance is equally distributed, but opportunity is not. And Andela has trained and placed thousands of software engineers from Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Egypt, and Ghana. We're going to talk about her personal experiences with coaching on both sides of the equation, seeking out inherent blind spots in the corporate world and relating lessons she's taken from her experiences as a founder and activist and how we should be investing in people and handling growth both personally and as a nation.

Christina, thank you so very much for being a part of this experiment, not just the whole experiment, but also this more free flowing dynamic that we're going to try today. I can't tell you how much I appreciate you being here.

Christina Sass:

Well, thank you. It's an honor to be here and I'm delighted to try it this way. It's what our conversations have always felt like and have yielded so much, so I'm looking forward to it.

Jeff Hunter:

Well, thank you. So Christina, you are the co founder of Andela and I’ve had the great good fortune, Talentisms had the great good fortune over the last four years of working with Andela, a company that I've been truly inspired by across the board, not only your mission, but also the benefit you're bringing to the world and just what you're putting into practice. I thought that just before we get into the coaching conversation, if you'd be willing to reflect a little bit on Andela a little bit on how you started Andela and also a little bit about how we met I'd really appreciate it.

Christina Sass:

Absolutely. Well, we started Andela in 2014 looking at how to get talent globally, to recognize brilliance, in particular brilliance among software engineers, which are so desperately needed by startups all over the world. At the time I'd been working across the African continent for about the last five years and knew the incredible depth of the talent pool and really the excitement and energy around tech careers. And so my co founder Jeremy, and another group of entrepreneurs, and I got together to kind of put this experiment out, to see if we could attract really extraordinary tech talent and then match it with the needs of employers everywhere that needed great software developers. The world was getting accustomed to remote and distributed teams at the time. And so we were kind of part of this wave to really bring that about and what an incredible six-year journey the company has now taken kind of many different shifts and turns and pivots as, as startups do.

For the first, probably three to four years, we were really focused on finding raw talent that had all the indicators of a great engineer and then honing them and really placing them in environments where they could succeed. Today Andela is more focused on big pockets of mid level and senior level developers and being an on demand marketplace for what other companies need. And so that entire journey I think, has been... I really can't, it's hard to, it's hard to state the value that you, Jeff, have brought to me and my co founder and the senior team, and Andela on our self awareness and big changes that we needed to make to move the business forward. So, how did we meet? I think this is a great story. So I worked with one of your colleagues at Talentism on a smaller project.

And one where candidly, I wasn't thrilled about the end. I think the gentleman I was working with was like on his way to I forgot what the circumstances were, but anyway, he was transitioning from Talentism to a full time role elsewhere and wasn't able to make a trip where he was supposed to facilitate a big conversation. And so in Talentisms IP had added a ton of value and then kind of the end of this thing, didn't go well. And so I got the final bill and I wrote you all and said, I will pay this. I'm happy to pay it, but can we get on the phone and can we talk and can I give you some feedback? And to my surprise the CEO of the company, you Jeff undertook the call and listened very carefully.

And you explained that you kind of knew that this younger employee who had a lot of promise, but that you're going to have to entrust them with some things, and they may not always go right. That you had been also experimenting and that you took full responsibility for that, that I indeed would not be paying that bill. And could you have dinner with our entire senior team and give feedback on what you thought, what your learnings were from the scope of work that Talentism had done. And so suffice to say I was blown away by that. And that was certainly the kind of leader that I hoped to be. That had the courage and strength to give my team members, my leaders rope to do an experiment. And then when it didn't go well to really take responsibility and make that relationship right.

And that's what I witnessed that you did. We had a phenomenal dinner with the C suite of the company at the time, and everyone was very impressed. And then I think I called you the next day. It'd be like you’ve got to coach us. You have to coach us. We know we have gaps in our self awareness and our knowledge and where we want to take the company. And to our great surprise and delight, you said yes. And that's been the beginning of a many year, very fruitful, painful at times, but overall incredibly rewarding relationship.

Jeff Hunter:

Well, thank you. Thank you very much. I like any human being enjoys caring how great I am, but I can assure you that in the mountain of my mistakes, that was a...