⭐ Executive Coach Spotlight: Farrah Mitra
Founder & Executive Coach at Green Reed | Radical Candor Coach & Trainer
With the war in Ukraine, I’m finding it difficult to publish content as usual. Yet, I know the critical role internal communications plays in the lives of employees, in particular during challenging times. With this in mind, I’ll begin publishing select articles again with the hope that these profiles and best practices will support all of you in the important work you lead.
In This Interview
🙏🏽 Change your career and life with Coaching
🎁 Tap into the skills needed to be an Executive Coach
📚 Partner with Executive Coaches as Internal Communications
About Farrah
Farrah Mitra is a strategy consultant-turned executive coach, leadership development facilitator, and consultant. She is known for championing and investing in those she works with and empowering them both to shift their mindset as well as to obtain the practical frameworks and infrastructure they need to enable their success.
Farrah supports individuals and executives and empowers them to level up and make key career transitions as well as navigate challenging leadership situations. In addition, she partners with start-ups who are experiencing hyper-growth but who do not yet have the expertise and support they need for ultimate success. Farrah delivers her work through a structured approach that enables clarity and seamless decision making by her clients. In particular, she brings clear frameworks to the softer and harder-to-measure topics of leadership so that the learnings are usable and practical.
She worked at Bain & Company for more than twelve years, first as a strategy consultant earning multiple promotions, and then serving as part of their Global Professional Development team. She then became the Sr. Director of People & Culture at Medallia and was most recently VP of People at Alto Pharmacy, where she helped build the people functions at both companies from the ground up.
Farrah is one of 12 Radical Candor coach trainers in the world. She trained at the Coaches Training Institute and hold certifications in MBTI, EQ-i, and the Leadership Circle Profile. She attended Cornell University where she graduated Cum Laude. Farrah enjoys swimming, walking on hiking paths (she's honest about her hiking skills) and spending time with her daughter and husband.
What sparked your professional path into Executive Coaching?
I have loved all things business and people since I was really young. One of my earliest memories is teaching dolls math! That theme has really followed me — I’ve done a lot of teaching, community service, mentoring and tutoring. But, I've also gravitated to business and analytics.
I studied Engineering at Cornell University and took every business class possible. I went into consulting at Bain & Company to solve problems and help people because of their commitment to fostering professional development and to pro bono work. I worked with clients in my full-time role and took on extra-curricular projects to mentor, train, and coach colleagues. I then moved into the Global Training organization at Bain. I then went on to be a leader on the People and Culture team at a hyper-growth start-up. In each role, I was combining my love of all things business and people.
Once I felt I had a strong foundation in business principles and executive experience, I brought these themes together into executive coaching. My life mission is to empower people. I’m having an incredible time learning how to build my own business while doing the thing I love most — teaching, coaching and mentoring.
How has coaching changed your life?
There was a time in my life where I suffered from severe pain limiting the use of my hands and legs. In college, I had people helping hold my lunch tray for me and I was frequently going to doctors in between classes. Years later, I couldn't walk, sit, or stand well. I always thought it was tied to physical ailments, but I realized that I was holding onto a lot of challenges I experienced as a kid. I was holding in a lot of my stress and it was causing my pain.
As a young kid, I was always worried about bad things happening to me. Many years later, I was still thinking this way without even realizing it. Gaining this self awareness and working to let go of my fears, through coaching, was the key to breaking the cycle and reducing my pain. The same challenges also impacted me as a leader. While I knew what good leadership looked like, I struggled with it because constantly thinking about how things can go wrong makes it hard to empower your employees to have ownership and to take things on their own path.
One of the things I'm most proud of is how I was able to improve my grasp of leadership, and it helps me as a coach because I can relate to other’s experiences and challenges. I try to take an approach of supporting people to focus both on their mindset and execution. For example, I can teach you how to give someone ownership, but if you're like me and thinking things will often go wrong, it's going to be really hard for you to implement it in the real world. So, my approach combines both.
How do you describe Executive Coaching to others?
Executive coaching is a way of gaining strong self awareness of how you can both double down on strengths and how you can work on things that are challenging or holding you back to unlock your potential. I think of executive coaching as being a thought-partner to people. The people who I work with hold the content of their goals and challenges. I bring the right questions, frameworks and tools to help them achieve their goals.
Executive coaching is highly tailored to one's situation and creates a space where you can talk through the good, the bad and the ugly because you have to be able to share what works for you and what's not working for you. While working with executives, I want people to feel empowered, know what to do and how to do it. There are always tangible next steps after our sessions.
What is a project you are particularly proud to have accomplished?
Radical Candor coaching is some of the best work I've ever done because it's so aligned to the philosophy of how I work — it's not just teaching people how to give feedback, it’s helping them understand why giving feedback is so hard and helping them feel really motivated and excited to be give that feedback. As one of 12 coaches in the world who is trained in this methodology, it is also one of the coolest things I've done.
I am also the most proud of the work I did with an organization that had a phenomenal mission. The CEO was very early in forming their leadership team and wanted to evaluate how their own leadership was helping the organization. I led a 360 assessment for this CEO by speaking to the leadership team and other employees to get their perspectives on the CEO’s leadership. I was able to put together a storyline from these conversations with tactical suggestions for areas to continue and areas of opportunity. The CEO was really open to getting feedback and what I loved most was how they openly shared their entire assessment with their leadership team.
The CEO was so inspired by this experience that they asked me to put together an assessment for each individual on the leadership team. It was an incredible investment by using the Leadership Circle Profile which shows you the skillsets where you thrive as well as the types of behaviors that may get in one’s way when in a place of reactivity/stress. I took every leader through this process to help them get good self awareness and to set goals for development.
I then led and designed an off-site focused on taking that individual self awareness and helping them to see how they then worked together as a team. This was important as they were still gelling and understanding each other and naturally, like most teams, had challenges. We used a mat version of the circle assessment and physically stepped on the mat to share their areas of strength and opportunity. The leaders found that where they were having a hard time working together, it was often because they realized they were similar to each other vs. different! For example, a few executives found that when they get stressed, they each tend to control the situation, which was causing friction with all of them needing control.
This team did the hard work together - talking about any elephants in the room. This offsite and the conversations they had really set them up for their continued future together. I was also asked to coach some of the individual leaders to help them translate their development goals to reality. This investment really showed how the organization was invested in professional growth and development. I am really proud of the work I did with this team and organization.
What are the skills that are most important for someone to succeed in Executive Coaching?
Being a good listener is key — being able to listen to understand and not to respond (a key skill I have learned from being a Radical Candor coach). The analytical business part of me has 10 more questions to ask, but you have to listen to play back what the person is experiencing to truly understand them. You want people to feel as safe as possible, and to feel safe is to feel heard. Along with this is not having an agenda so that you are truly listening to understand the root of what's going on.
Being in service to people means being able to give feedback. I try to be really supportive and warm AND also say what I think needs to be said to help a person grow and develop. Also, I think of my job as being there to support, not help. People are very resourceful and can use a thought-partner rather than a helper. You have to be a coach that believes in people and that makes a difference in how you work with people.
How have you collaborated with Internal and Executive Communications leaders?
As a former people executive, I work with Chief People Officers and Heads of People who lead in hyper growth environments. I worked for a company that went from 150 people to 300 in a year and then 300 to 600 in a year, then 600 to 1,000. I learned a lot very quickly both in terms of what policies, processes, and systems are required as well as how difficult it is to lead people. And very importantly, I learned how important internal communications are in examples where change is a constant and can be scary.
A really small, but important example of this is when a tech company changed the snacks in the break room, people thought something was wrong and asked if there were financial issues in the company when the reality was, they simply changed the snacks for variety. While this was a small example, in hyper growth, there are so many moments where internal communications matter, especially when it comes to change management.
Internal comms are critical to trust and safety and that is so important in an environment that's high-performance. If as a company, you're trying to build something amazing, then you're going to have to do amazing things that no one's ever done before and that requires a lot of iteration and learning and how you communicate that matters. I focus on advising companies around how to communicate these changes and hyper growth in a way that helps employees feel safe, perform, do their best work, and thrive.
How do you continue learning about your field?
I have a phenomenal coach who I work with around my own personal development and who helps me develop my own coaching skills. I am always learning about frameworks and pursuing certifications and courses that align with my philosophy, for example, the Leadership Circle, Immunity to Change, and Positive Intelligence work.
I also really love podcasts that show you how someone uses a coaching methodology and walks through actual examples. I’m listening to Over It and On With It with Christine Hassler on internal family systems with Dr. Richard Schwartz – it’s about the parts of us that are usually responsible for the gridlock in our emotional healing. The Tim Ferriss Show featured an interview with Diana Chapman that’s phenomenal. It’s called — How to Get Unstuck, Do “The Work,” Take Radical Responsibility, and Reduce Drama in Your Life.
What other resources do you recommend to others for their professional development?
As a Radical Candor coach, I always recommend Radical Candor by Kim Scott and the workshops! The workshops give people a chance to get practical tips they can implement right away and to practice giving feedback in a safe space. The Radical Candor website also has Kim's keynote address that offers so much wisdom in 30 minutes and as well as many other great resources. I also love sharing this First Round Review article where I first learned about Radical Candor and fell in love with the framework!
☎️ Every edition of The Switchboard is personally curated by me — Julia Levy. This post is based on a live interview conversation and edited for publication. Learn more about why I write.