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Transitioning from Corporate Leadership to Executive Coaching | Lance Tanaka
Leveraging your personal experience to become a successful coach.
An interview with Lance Tanaka about self-discovery, shifting from the c-suite to coaching, and the areas where many coaches struggle.
Many believe that being a great leader in the business world means you’re automatically going to be a great leadership coach. If you can do it, you can teach it, right?
Wrong! Teaching is a difficult skill, one that must be learned and developed like any other. Many brilliant leaders fail to achieve success as a coach simply because they don’t prepare for “Teacherhood.” They face difficulties translating their insights, as well as discussing premium fees, or maintaining networks. So how do you make the leap?
For our answer, we turn to Lance Tanaka, Founder and Managing Director of the Lance Tanaka Group, an organization focusing on coaching the best of the best around the world.
Lance shares how he went from the general manager of Pepsi Tokyo to being a renowned executive coach, accumulating over 17,000 hours helping executives around the world since the Lance Tanaka Group’s inception in 2001. He expresses the importance of self-discovery as an aid in coaching, and explains why more CEOs need to take time out for their own self-reflection.
We examine the three things Lance looks at when hiring coaches to work at his company, and ways that new coaches can avoid falling prey to common problems. He explains why it’s critical to keep an updated and relevant network, secure referrals, and be steadfast in your fees – and how many new coaches struggle with these issues. Lance lists the critical strengths a coach needs to bring to the table – and specific industry knowledge isn’t at the top of the list!
If you are starting to think about your future moving from the corporate space into coaching, or have struggled as a new coach, this is a great episode for you!
Three Key Takeaways:
- Thought Leaders seeking to coach need a passion for helping people change, and a strong ability to connect and empathize with their clients.
- It is imperative that Thought Leaders keep in touch with their network as their career path evolves, to ensure your connections know about your current offerings.
- When it comes to fees for Thought Leadership, don’t be afraid to stand your ground. Offer smaller scope for a limited budget instead of discounts on your rates.
If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.
Transcript
Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is the Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Lance Tanaka. He’s currently the founder and managing director of the Lance Tanaka Group, which is a consulting firm that provides executive coaching for the best of the best, working with leading multinational and local companies in their respective industries throughout Asia-Pac. Since 2001, Lance has accumulated over 17,000 coaching hours of executives from China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, U.S. and Europe. And in terms of the other side of your world prior to that is you’ve got a lot of corporate leadership experience. So managing director of PepsiCo and Salim Group, VP of Southeast Asia for Pepsi-Cola sales director at Tokyo Bottling, etc., etc., because I find that interesting. Lance, welcome in that there are coaches that have been coaches there all life and there are businesspeople that have been businesspeople their entire lives. But you had the best of both worlds. So. So how did one lead to the other? Let’s start there.
Lance Tanaka Now. Yeah, it actually started when I was 35. I was the at the time as the general manager for Tokyo Pepsi. Great job, great company. Reason why I can do what I do now because of Pepsi. But I realized, okay, that’s not what I want to do for the rest of my life. You know, I don’t want to be a corporate executive. It’s great. But while, you know, not the rest of my life and so I actually set a target sign at 45, ten years from then that I would retire and I would set up a company. At the time, I didn’t know what that company would be or what it would do, but I just knew, okay, I have to figure out a way to be able to leverage my strengths, my passions, my experiences.
Peter Winick But when I want to stop you there as a coach, because as a coach, if somebody came to you with such a simultaneously specific yet vague goal, how would you respond to that to yourself at 35 as a coach? Because there seemed something interesting about that.
Lance Tanaka Well, I think that the starting point for most people and actually, you know, I’ve coached, as you said, 17,000 hours, over a thousand executives over the last 20 years. The number one topic of all the topics we talk about for leadership is around authenticity, which is around how do I become the leader I was designed to be? How do I leverage who I am? And so as I was going through that process over the ten years, I started going through exercises to start identifying my strengths, my path and all the experiences. And you know what it did, It really started getting really clear to me why I was successful at Pepsi and Nike. And you know what I need to do to use that for my entrepreneurial experience. And that was all around leadership development, around people.
Peter Winick So would you say that as a coach, you were you’re also your first client because it sounds like you’re incredibly introspective and sort of applying a lot of coaching tools on yourself, but maybe not using that language. Or is that not a fair statement?
Lance Tanaka No, that is that is I think self-discovery is a I should say a lost art, but it’s something that a lot of successful people don’t do because, you know, like, what was that, Pepsi, Nike. I’m just focused on I got to fix this problem. I got to drive this market. I got to turn this around. And all your energies, especially your mental energy, is a focus around that. But a reality is that you need to be able to spend some time around self reflection, around, around self-discovery and trying to figure out who you are and again, become more of that.
Peter Winick And you know, what role does a good coach play? Because I would argue that most people are pretty poor judges of how introspective or self-aware they are. And part of the function of a coach is to help someone through that process, not to not to outsource the self-awareness, right. But to help them. Someone to be honest and frank and authentic and call B.S. and all that. Is that is that aligned with your thinking?
Lance Tanaka Yeah, I’d say that’s one of the key aspects of being an executive coach, is that if the leader CEOs I mean, they’re on an island, no one tells them what they really think, that, you know, that.
Peter Winick Their jokes are really funny.
Lance Tanaka And love your vision and yeah, don’t fix anything. Don’t change. And it’s what’s needed is somebody who says, yeah, called before says, Hey, you said this. You didn’t do it or around self-reflection because most people say, yes, I want to do it, but they don’t. And so one of the roles of a coach is to is to hold people accountable.
Peter Winick Yeah. This is that forging mechanism. So I want to flip now, Lance, from your backstory because interesting, you know, seasoned corporate exec to coach. And just because you have the skills and the credibility on the corporate side doesn’t mean you would be successful as a coach from and I’m not talking about the art of coaching, but from the business side. So let’s talk about some of sort of the struggles, trials, tribulations of what it really takes to stand up a successful coaching practice.
Lance Tanaka Yeah. You know, I’m always looking to recruit coaches into my into what I call my circle, the nine. Right now, it’s a slow, slow process because when I look at somebody as a as a coach, there’s basically three things I look at. Number one, and it’s kind of like a come to the party DNA thing, which is do you have the overwhelming passion to help people to change? The difference between do I care about people or do I care about helping people to change? Those are two very, very different things. Okay. Because I think one of the key aspects of a successful coaching assignment is that person changes and everybody around them sees it. So the first thing I look for is, do you really have this overwhelming desire to help people change? Second one is, do you have this natural, again, DNA, natural ability to get people to trust you quickly? Do people open up to you right away? Do people tell you their life story? Do people tell you, I have a terrible time with my marriage or my bosses and any other? Yeah. But the third thing is around practical, which is art. Have you been in business? Have you been in turnarounds, mergers and acquisitions? Have you helped develop a company grow? And have you done it in different, different ways?
Peter Winick But I wanted to go more specifically to your business. You’re in the business of coaching. Right. And it’s not just you. So most first off, most let me sort of back into this. Most coaches don’t have enough clients to make a living. That’s just a fact, right? There are more coaches out there that sort of dabble or whatever, and it has no bearing on. They may be excellent coaches, they just may might be God awful at the sales and the marketing and the business side. Like, how do I actually get the clients? Geez, I have no idea. Get me the client. I can do mirror miraculous things. So you’ve check the box, you’ve got a full roster of clients, then you’ve gone where very, very few other coaches go. You actually have others deploying. You call it your circle. So I want to just sort of talk about the business model. What are the things that you believe in relative to finding clients on a consistent basis, serving those clients, pricing really the business side of because that’s where I think I mean, there are bad coaches in terms of they’re just not qualified. But I think most folks that could be awesome coaches struggle more on the business side than on the art of coaching, if you will.
Lance Tanaka Yeah. Well, couple of things. One, networking is absolute priority. You’ve got to have the discipline to network constantly. And this doesn’t mean I’ll do this on a Friday or I’ll do this next month. It’s you’ve got to do it every single day. So that’s.
Peter Winick But let me let me push on that. So old school networking pre-COVID and even pre-COVID it was antiquated was, you know, things that most people dread. The local chamber of commerce and the getting out there and the cocktail parties and whatever. I think for the most part, that world is sort of over. Right. So networking means something different today. How do I interact with people that I wouldn’t have without doing some certain things? Is it you agree with that?
Lance Tanaka Right. Right. Well, it’s not just networking just to meet people. It’s got to be targeted each or you’ve got to have a strategy to it. And my strategy was when I first started out, my focus was I’m going to start working with our companies in the top ten of their industries, their sectors. So that’s why I focused on a McKinsey or Goldman Sachs or a Deloitte.
Peter Winick Okay, So stay there for a minute. So you defined listen, I want to work with the best of the best. Here’s a list of some best of best companies, Goldman, McKinsey, whoever you chose to define that. And then you said after that, okay. And in those organization, it’s people at a certain level managing to write whatever it was. So now you’ve gone from the broad universe to fairly narrow, which would then sort of help you select the networking you do. You’re not going to go to the local, you know, realtors networking event if that doesn’t align with your objectives.
Lance Tanaka Exactly. Exactly. But then the next step and this is part that a lot of people miss is that you need to look at your current network. And, you know, I I’d spent my 20 something years in the in the you know, in business in industry and you build an exceptional network. And so it’s look at the people that you know whether it’s colleagues, ex colleagues, family friends associations, people that know you. And what you do is you start with that with the idea of I want to get to McKinsey or I want to get to Goldman Sachs. And I’m sure you heard the term six degrees of separation. Yep, yep. And the way you get to that decision maker is you can’t go direct to them. You can’t call, can’t say, by the way, you know, I’m Lance Tanaka. Would you be interested in leadership coaching? No, of course that doesn’t work. You got to get introduced to them by somebody that they know or trust. So you got to start that process.
Peter Winick So I agree. I agree with that 100%. And we take a lot of our clients through what we call a strategic account planning process where we say, hey, listen, you’ve gotten to this stage of the game. You probably have a nice network. You’re probably fairly well liked, renowned and respected. Number one, you have to recalibrate that network because the network only knows you by their last point of contact. So in your case, if I haven’t talked to you for X number of years, I might only know that you were the Tokyo Bottling Company guy 20 something years ago. So the burden is on you to keep them up to date to say, Hey, actually this is what I’m doing now. This is why I’m doing it. And these are the types of folks I’d like to connect to, Right? And you can actually light up your network, like you said, not just directly, like, I can get you to introduce you to five folks at McKinsey, but even if you just recalibrate how they think about you, Lance is now an executive coach looking to work with the best of the best. I can file that in my brain. And when I come across someone now, I have a reason to reach out to you.
Lance Tanaka Yeah. You know, a lot of it’s top of mind and that. Okay, let’s say I do talk to somebody, I make a recontact, and I know I’m getting this. It’s going to it’s going to drop out of their mind when something comes along. And so you need to you need to have this ability to reconnect over a period of time. So it’s not when you’re connecting for the first time, you’re not selling it, of course. Right. It’s all about, let’s, you know, let’s reestablish our relationship. And then over time, you start making, you know, connections with that person here and there. And then at one point, then maybe you get into the into the sales cycle.
Peter Winick If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com/podcasts.
Lance Tanaka The other thing that I found really powerful for me in my business, it’s all about being referred. Yeah, girls are everything and I’ve got an amazing client list. I mean, you look at my client list, it’s just incredible. But in the past, I didn’t do anything about it. So now I actually go to my clients who are happy with me. I’ve been working with for years and say, you know, is there anybody that you think could use my service? Or I might even frame it, say, Do you know people in this company or in this industry that could use your services? Most of our businesses is through referral now and then, because I’m dealing with the companies like the Goldmans, the Deloittes, they have a lot of clients. And so they.
Peter Winick Can. Yeah, well, there’s also I think some of the. Nature of coaching is because it is such a personal, intimate, you know, relationship. It’s not like, Lance is a great bricklayer. Let me show you the bricks he laid for me. Like, it doesn’t work like that. So it needs to be like a when I look a colleague in the eye and say, I’ve been working with Lance for two years and here’s how he’s changed the way I think about the world and the game and all that. They’re going to be begging for that connection, that introduction, right? So I think there is something to be said for that. And again, the referrals to different businesses, it’s always important in some businesses and I would think coaching is probably at the top of the list. It’s Capital I imports. Yeah, yeah. So talk about now.
Lance Tanaka People are sensitive about it, but most people that I that I work with or I’ve worked with are will go out of their way to, to introduce me.
Peter Winick So I want to get into a little bit of another area that I’ve observed coaches, consultants and authors sort of struggle. So it’s really an awkward, difficult sort of strange position to be in of ultimately you’re in the business of selling yourself as a coach, but you’re also the CEO of your own entity, right? And once you start talking about negotiating pricing, you know, all that sort of stuff, what I have found and it might not be true across the board is when you’re, you know, in in a high touch professional services and you start sort of going down those conversations, it’s usually the client that wins more than the provider because you just want to get out of that conversation and get into doing the good work. So how do you how are you able to make the case and defend, you know, a premium pricing position?
Lance Tanaka Sure, sure. You know, first of all, you’ve got to be you’ve got to be really confident. You’ve got to believe that my service is worth more than the weight and gold. If you don’t have that confidence, you’re just going to get bargained down to the lowest denominator. So I’d say, first of all, you’ve got to be, you know, supremely confident that you are charging the right right now. When I first started in the business, I didn’t charge high enough and I didn’t know, you know, what’s the right rate that you charge. And so I started getting into doing surveys or responding to service that would give us information, not this is the coaching world, these are the rates, these are the hours and started discovering work.
Peter Winick So stay there for a minute because I think that a lot of people come into coaching and they just don’t know. So, for example, if your strategy was go after the best of the best because you weren’t that savvy about pricing and you started putting out sort of low level pricing, pricing makes a statement, you’re like, wait a minute, the best of the best are charging whatever thousand dollars an hour. Why are you charging 72 to like a both can’t be true because pricing also has a function of supporting the brand promise. I only work with the best high stakes outcome ROI, but why are you giving it away for that price? And I think there’s this conflict of view. You know, I’m going to be nervous to say that big number out loud or that, but to put it in a proposal.
Lance Tanaka Exactly. But if you know, if one of you’re confident in your ability to you understand where you fit in the universe of the industry, I think that gives you a lot, you know, better foundation to be able to guess. You want to call it negotiate. Now, unfortunately, in a situation where I don’t negotiate.
Peter Winick Right, which is which is the only place to be. Right. And I think well, and I don’t mean to be snarky, but it’s like I think that it’s an indication of a somewhat unsophisticated buyer when they’re trying to negotiate unless your pricing is just way out of whack or something. They lost a top tier coach over a six month engagement. This is the range. I’m in the range. We don’t really need to talk a lot about pricing because it is what it is.
Lance Tanaka You know? Yeah. And you know, it’s the responsibility of the buyer and it’s usually somebody in H.R. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it’s her job to get you negotiated down to a lower rate and I don’t hold it personally but I basically say here’s the rate. If that doesn’t work for you fine. What we can do is maybe with the scope because if you’re looking at overall budget is too high, okay, let’s reduce the scope and then maybe we can get at it.
Peter Winick And I love that. So I love that because the reducing the scope says I’m not giving you the same for less. I’m giving you less for less. And I think a lot of people I mean, it seems like an obvious tactic, but like, okay, if you don’t want to pay me X over six months, then why don’t we start with paying me? Why over three months would probably look like something like 50% of the other, but you’ve still kept your baseline and put your stake in the ground of This is my value. If you don’t want to commit to all of it or whatever. And I think a lot of people are again reluctant to do that. And you mentioned the confidence. I want to I want to push on the confidence because I think the flip side of confidence is to be able to have the case studies, anecdotes, whatever to say. Here’s some of the outcomes I’ve gotten for folks like you. Would that, you know, would that be of interest to you?
Lance Tanaka Yeah. And you know, most buyers will ask you who have your coach, what have you done? Give us some. And case studies. Yeah, especially in their industry. Say, do you have experience in the pharma biotech industry? Actually, in reality, Peter, it doesn’t matter. And a good.
Peter Winick Coach, Well, that’s exactly.
Lance Tanaka What benefits pharma or automobiles or high tech.
Peter Winick Think for a minute because I think that is a huge, huge issue that people understand, like, wait a minute, you’re not paying me top dollar because I know pharma better than you. You’ve been in the family business for 30 years. You’re one of the top five people in your company. I’m the last guy who’s going to teach you anything about that. But let me tell you what I know about leadership. Let me tell you what I know about being authentic. Let me tell you what I know about that. And the fact that I’ve got this portfolio of industries actually enhances our experience because I can bring you things that people in finance or consulting or CPG or whatever are doing that you wouldn’t even think of because you’re kind of so myopic only being informed for so long.
Lance Tanaka Exactly. Exactly. What really sells clients is, you know, basically two things. They want to know your track record. So, you know, if you’ve done one engagement with, you know, because you see a lot of coaches websites says, I work with J. J Well, they only did one coaching assignment. That to me is not credibility. You go in there and say, I’ve worked with J for seven years and I’ve done ten people I’ve worked with like 20 years. You’ve done 150 people. That’s one thing, Credibility. But the second thing is what you mentioned is case studies. If you can give them examples of situations like what they’re looking for and how you’ve done it with this company, whether it’s the same industry or not, that’s what grabs their attention because they’re saying, Yeah, that’s my problem. That’s the issue that we have. And yet you see that you’ve done it.
Peter Winick Yeah. And then I think there’s two sort of outcomes from the case studies is how did that impact the business? good. We were stock or we rolled out some failed products or whatever, whatever, and now we’re unstuck. And then the other, which they might be more interested in but probably won’t verbalize them, is. And as a result of that, my SVP went on to become CEO. Well like look at the career trajectory, which is another testament to the outcomes of the accomplishments.
Lance Tanaka Yeah, I mean very rarely can you point to a metric and saying, well we, we helped this person gain three market share points. I mean we just can’t. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get to this point of saying here’s what happened this this person change in this way people around us saw it and from that they were able to be able to. Yeah, that that’s a metric that’s important also.
Peter Winick Well this has been fantastic. Lance, I appreciate your candor and sharing your story and you’re obviously passionate about what you do. There was a lot packed into a short period of time today, so thank you so much for sharing it with us.
Lance Tanaka My pleasure, Peter. Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
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