🗝 Nick deWilde, Co-Founder & Chief Customer Officer at Exec
Publisher of The Jungle Gym Newsletter
In This Edition
📣 The power of coaching to support employees
✏️ How a writing practice can help you stay grounded and share ideas
☕ The importance of strong work relationships
About Nick
Nick is the Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer of Exec (exec.com), a tech-enabled talent development agency that helps companies like SAP, JP Morgan, and Campbell's design and manage custom coaching and training programs.
He publishes a monthly newsletter called
to +12,000 subscribers that covers career strategy, talent development, and the future of work.He has nearly a decade of experience in the talent development industry including as a product marketing leader at Guild ($4.4B Valuation) helping organizations like Walmart, Target, and Disney build upskilling programs for frontline workers. He was also a Managing partner at Tradecraft, an immersive career accelerator that helped high-potential talent transition into sales, marketing, design, and engineering roles at fast-growing startups.
What sparked your interest in leadership and coaching, and ultimately launching Exec?
I’ve been working in Talent Development for the past decade. Before launching Exec, I was a product marketing leader at Guild, which helps large organizations like Walmart, Target, and Disney build upskilling programs for frontline workers. When I joined Guild in 2020, HR and Talent Development leaders were grappling with a lot of change.
Every news cycle created new challenges around retention, engagement, and capability development. These were problems that videos couldn’t solve. The most impactful solutions were home-grown talent development programs that blended coaching and training with plenty of customization and context from the internal team.
The problem was, these programs require a lot of administrative overhead, a wide network of vendors, and budgets that many companies simply didn’t have. They were either going to expensive talent development agencies to get something custom or going to a tech platform and losing out on the customization they came for in the first place.
These leaders wanted to run their talent development programs their way. What they needed was a stronger, vetted network of coaches and trainers, and a robust set of program design tools to help them save time on admin work and keep control over budgeting.
These insights drove us to launch Exec, a tech-enabled talent development agency. We allow clients to curate coaches and trainers from our network, use our robust set of program design tools to build custom programs, and leverage a credit system that lets companies stretch their budgets further.
What’s one project you are particularly proud of accomplishing over the years?
In 2019, I started publishing a monthly newsletter called The Jungle Gym that now goes out to 12,000+ subscribers. I started it to give my kids a time capsule of my thoughts, and also to have a space to write about talent development, careers, and the future of work.
For example, I wrote an article called "If you had your dream job, would you be happy?” right after finishing The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi. The book is a conversation between a mentor and a mentee, and I borrowed that style when I wrote the post.
I also wrote about the concept of Platform Branding, the idea of building a company where you elevate your employees into influencers. This is more common now, but it was relatively novel when I wrote about it in 2021.
While I’m proud of the audience it’s grown, I’m mostly happy that I’ve managed to keep consistently publishing after all these years.
How do you see Internal Communications and Culture overlapping with the impact of Coaching?
Work is about relationships and a lot of what taxes people at work is the drama that gets created in those relationships. That drama creates an open loop in your head and distracts you from the important work you need to be doing. Coaching provides a space where people can process drama and actually do something about it.
Coaching also gives people the skills so they can avoid creating drama for others. People who are well-coached drastically change the way they communicate with others in both public and interpersonal scenarios.
How do you continue learning about your field?
A lot of my learning comes from conversations — I spend 6 hours a day finding out what challenges leaders are facing and try to find ways to help solve them. You can gain a lot of insights that are hard to get in public places sometimes. Those are the learnings that I find are most impactful to my day-to-day work.
Thank you for reading The Switchboard. ☎️ Every edition is personally written by me — Julia Levy. Learn more about why I write. Review the Index of past posts.
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