Whitney Hess
Coaching with Presence and Purpose
In this episode of Brave UX, Whitney Hess dives into why failure isn’t what it seems 🦉, how she empowers the people she coaches 🌻, and what it’s really like to live life aboard a boat ⛵️.
Highlights include:
- What is the number one rule of coaching people?
- Why did you remove failure from your vocabulary?
- What are the big issues facing the people you’ve been coaching?
- Is there any merit in managers keeping emotional distance?
- Why is it risky for designers not to pursue the management track?
Who is Whitney Hess?
Whitney is the founder and executive coach of Vicarious Partners, through which she’s on a mission to put the humanity back into business by helping leaders to design their careers and accelerate their missions 🚀.
And Whitney has coached leaders and teams at an impressive array of organisations, including at Apple, Cisco, IDEO, Microsoft, Netflix, and VMware. She has the credentials too, being a Certified Integral Coach through New Ventures West and a Professional Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation 🪪.
In a previous Whitney spent a decade as an independent UX consultant, helping organisations to establish and strengthen their user experience practices 💪, while simultaneously helping their people to work through the sticky interpersonal issues that often got in the way.
Whitney has been recognised for her UX work with Foundation Center, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and many more 👀.
Transcript
- Whitney Hess:
- Even if you think you did fail at something, if you had a goal and you failed to meet that goal, you are not a failure. You might fail at doing something, but you are not a failure. And I just see too much of a narrative in our culture identifying with the failing and it's just not something that I'm willing to allow myself to do because it just feels so inaccurate.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class, human-centered research and innovation lab. You can find out more about me and what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the field of design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders.
- My guest today is Whitney Hess. Whitney is the founder and executive coach of Vicarious Partners through which she's on a mission to put the humanity back into business by helping leaders to design their careers and accelerate their missions. And Whitney has coached leaders and teams at an impressive array of organisations, including at Apple, Cisco, ideo, Microsoft, Netflix, and VMware.
- She has the credentials too, being a certified integral coach through New Ventures West and a professional certified coach with the International Coaching Federation and, in a previous life, Whitney spent a decade as an independent UX consultant helping organisations to establish and strengthen their user experience practises while simultaneously helping their people to work through the sticky interpersonal issues that often got in the way.
- Whitney has been recognised for her UX work with Foundation Centre, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centre for Nonviolent Social Change and many more.
- She is the author of Pleasure and Pain, a blog that's been going strong for 16 years, the co-inventor of a United States patent with American Express and a guest on some great podcasts like Good Morning UX, The UX Podcast and Rosenfeld Review. And now she's here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Whitney, a very warm welcome to the show.
- Whitney Hess:
- Thank you so much for having me, Brendan. I'm so happy to be here with you today.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- No, I'm happy you could join me here too, Whitney, and we battled through a few technical difficulties to get here, so it's made it even more special. I wanted to ask you about something curious that I learned I think was when you were talking with Lou on your conversation with him on the Rosenfeld review and that's you once lived on a sailboat for a couple of years. What's the story there?
- Whitney Hess:
- So my partner Frederick and I, when we first got together, we had a shared love of being on the water. We both grew up on the water in various ways in our childhoods and we talked late into the night early in our relationship about what we would dream of doing together one day and sailing around the world was one of those things that came up and not long into our relationship. We ended up moving to the Florida Keys where we had a small speedboat, a 16 foot Carolina skiff and a dock behind our house and we would go out into the ocean at sunset and we loved that life and when we moved to San Diego a year later, we decided that we were going to find a way to live the boating life even more intensely and intently and we ended up buying a sailboat and we moved aboard and we lived in a marina for about two and a half years. The funny thing is when you live on a boat, it's much harder to take that boat out sailing, so we actually did a lot less boating when we were living on a boat than when we weren't living on a boat. But when you have your laptop out and your picture frames and your dishes and everything else, it's a lot to put away when it's time to leave the dock.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I was wondering how close, if at all it was to the song I'm on a Boat by the Lonely Island and it sounds like it wasn't too close to that.
- Whitney Hess:
- No, that wasn't it though. I will say that we had a lot of fun. My partner is a chef and he can cook incredible meals out of a very small galley kitchen and we had just so much fun and it really felt like living the dream. But then one thing led to another, we went to Japan for three months, we moved back to New York City and eventually we sold the boat and we don't live on it anymore, but one day we will. Again.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I understand that you might be in the midst of planning a rather special sounded like boating adventure.
- Whitney Hess:
- Yeah, so in my bio I say that we are in the early stages of planning our circumnavigation and that is a bit tongue in cheek because we have lived in many places together, many of which I just named, but we do one day want to find a way to sail around the world. I don't know that it will be just the two of us. We will probably need a crew. Frederick is an incredible and he cruises on racing. He races in the summers and he's done boat deliveries and he's much more accomplished of a sailor than I am. So I think we would need a lot of lessons before it became a reality, but we have been not exactly nomadic because we've stayed for many months and years and places. We've been living in Maine now for over five years, but we certainly consider ourselves citizens of the world and love to travel and love to be on the water. And so one day the dream is to sail around the world.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You'll have to make a stop here in Auckland because Auckland's a big sailing city as well. In fact, I think the nickname for the city for a long time was the city of sales and like you were living in San Diego, I believe it was near the America's Cup base or there was something to do with
- Whitney Hess:
- That. Yes, in fact, we lived, our marina was America's Cup Harbour.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Similarly, we've had America's Cup hosted here a couple of times, so it's right on our waterfront too. It's wonderful to see the city come alive when all the racing's going on and man, I dunno if you've seen those new foiling, yachts that they race, they're pretty wild in terms of how fast they go.
- Whitney Hess:
- They can levitate. It seems pretty amazing.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'd wondered if your move to Maine was somewhat to get closer to the ocean for that circumnavigation that you are now clarifying for me that it was rather tongue in cheek and I had wondered if that was the thing that Maine had over New York because I think New York for many people has this kind of romantic kind of allure to it. It's got this energy, it's alive, it's one of these cities to live in. What does Maine have that New York doesn't have
- Whitney Hess:
- Space, peace and quiet, clean air. I don't want to say bad things about my hometown because I was born and raised in New York City. I love it. It is very much still home. Every time I visit, as soon as my foot hits the pavement, the New Yorker comes out of me again and I am able to move with that pace very naturally. But Maine is such a special place and yes, a big part of why we wanted to move here was to be on the ocean more readily, more actively. New York is surrounded by water, right? Manhattan is an island and there is a lot of sailing and there are wonderful beaches, but everything is quite an ordeal to get to. Whereas where we live now, we can go to five different beaches within 10 minutes. We could be on the bay, we can be in the ocean. There's a wonderful sailing community here. One of the things that I love the most about where we live is an incredible network of trails to walk in the woods and along the shore you can be places and be the only person there and that is just not something that you're ever going to get in New York. So that was one of the many reasons why we chose to move here.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One of my other, yes, on the podcast, Becky Prey, she has a, I think it's in Maine, I could be wrong, sorry Becky if I've got this wrong, but she has a farm out that way. She's from New York as well, and she has this idea of forest bathing and that you might be the only person to have ever walked in this particular part of the forest and you can kind of just soak that up. It does sound like a really relaxing step change from the busyness of the activity that goes on in a place like New York.
- Whitney Hess:
- Yes, it is. It's very special. You certainly do get that feeling of having been the only person ever there, which is probably not the case because indigenous people have been in this part of the world for 15,000 plus years and I'm sure that they've been in so many places that we today don't go. But I do love that feeling of being alone with nature, recognising the nature within myself and how much nature is a part of me and how disconnected we can be from that truth in our everyday lives and being here in Maine and having the opportunity to step right out and have access to it. I hear friends in the Pacific Northwest or in the Bay Area say similar things about they love the access to the activities that are meaningful to them and being out in the outdoors is a common part of life there, but they really have to get in a car and drive someplace to get to that. Here we walk outside our front door and we're in it. Nature preserves trails, coastline right behind where we live and it's pretty remarkable to have that access.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It does sound remarkable. And speaking of something remarkable, I heard you say something remarkable in your conversation with Brett and Greg on the Sprints and Milestone podcast and it was quite early on in your conversation with them, and I just want to quote you now, what you said was, I don't hold any of my life experiences as failures. Not to say I haven't failed at things, I have failed at many, many things and I've made many, many mistakes, but I don't hold them that way. I don't really have failure in my vocabulary. How did you manage to omit the dreaded F word from your vocabulary?
- Whitney Hess:
- It's interesting because I stand by that statement. I've always felt that way. It is really not something that I had to unlearn. I have of course heard many people my whole life talk about failure in that way. It's just never resonated for me. Firstly, I feel very strongly and it feels connected to nature in that when I'm in the woods or when I am on the beach staring out at the horizon line, we're looking up at the night sky, it's very easy to remember that I am a speck of dust in the universe, that I am as close to insignificant as possible while still having some significance because I exist and that perspective has always been incredibly important for me to maintain. And so it's easy say failure isn't real because to presume that I have total control over every outcome in this lifetime and that if I just did things the right way that I could make what I want happen happen, it's just not accurate in my worldview.
- There's so much else that's conspiring If I don't get that gig, somebody else got it. Somebody else who also had the dream and who also had the desire and the ambition and did the hard work. If my flight is cancelled or right now we're having some car trouble, if I'm not supposed to take that long drive that I was planning to take, I don't sold that as, oh, I screwed up. I should have done that differently and I should have been more prepared. Or whatever stories we tell ourselves, I look at the situation and I instead ask myself, what do I have to learn from this? What blessings might there be embedded in this thing not happening for me or not going the way that I thought it should go? I just don't consider it my responsibility to design every aspect of my life. I prefer it being a mystery.
- I prefer being in acceptance of what comes. And so while I get disappointed of course, and I screw things up all the time, I'm sure I'm a human being. I don't hold it with such an attachment that identify with it not going the way that I had hoped. I think that that's a little tricky about the narratives around failure, and I was actually just recently with a group of students. I work very closely with Pace University's Seidenberg, school of Computer Science and Information Systems, and I was with a group a few weeks ago in one of their classrooms and the topic of failure came up and the thing that I said to the students was, even if you think you did fail at something, if you had a goal and you failed to meet that goal, you are not a failure. You might fail at doing something, but you are not a failure. And I just see too much of a narrative in our culture identifying with the failing, and it's just not something that I'm willing to allow myself to do because it just feels so inaccurate.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I get the sense that for many of us, myself included for a long time, and I still do this to this day, we overinflate our own sense of what we control in life and we lend ourselves to being more brittle than we otherwise would if we adopted a position or a postulate. You've just articulated there around accepting whatever comes your way and trying to work with it. It sounds like a much lighter way of existing in the world. Not to say that you don't take what you're doing professionally and seriously, you have goals and objectives, but that you have what it sounds like a really healthy understanding of what's up to you and what's not up to you. You mentioned that this mindset, this approach that you take towards failure is something that you have almost always held if not always held. Is this something that you saw modelled in someone else while you were growing up? Is there some sort of connection to someone else or some event that sparked this way of thinking and being in you
- Whitney Hess:
- Potentially? I definitely think that I was surrounded by a lot of really ambitious people growing up, really smart people, but also people who had learned lessons the hard way and who had made adjustments and didn't allow anything in the past to impede what was possible for their future. So I think that that could be part of it. My parents are entrepreneurs and I've been running my own business since 2005, so I'm very much an entrepreneur as well. Perhaps that has something to do with it. I mean, if you are determined to be in charge of your own destiny and to be your own boss and to be creative and an artist, which is really what I see entrepreneurship as business as art, I think that you have to hold things loosely because you can't predict what is going to happen and you can't know what is meant for you.
- And so there needs to be a non-attachment. Yes, like you said, I'm prepared, I show up, I'm professional, I put my best effort into the things that I do, but I don't berate myself when something turns out differently than I expected. I think perhaps when you're an entrepreneur, and maybe I witnessed this when I was growing up, that there is a magic about what happens that you have ambitions, goals, objectives that you're setting that you're always trying to hit, but there also is just the open-ended curiosity of I wonder who's going to come calling next. And I love that aspect of what I do in my business and how I get to run my life. I don't have an expectation that tomorrow is going to look like today or that next week is going to look like last week, and everything is always different and always unknown, and I think I'm very comfortable with that at this point.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I'm not sure where I learned this, but it was somewhere recently and it's reflected in other faiths or religions or cultures in various ways, but I'm going to use Christians from the Middle Ages for example, for this particular example where they would often sign off their letters where they were intending something to happen with the words God willing. And it's this acknowledgement whether or not you believe in God's another matter, but it's this acknowledgement that not everything, even given our best efforts, not everything is within our control to influence the outcome. There are things that can happen like a business can fail because of timing or whatever. It is a natural disaster, this acknowledgement, and I feel like maybe since Nietzsche killed God, we've been lacking, we've been lacking that kind of escape clause, that kind of blow off valve to give us the permission to contend with failure in a way. And I'm using inverted commas there if you're listening to contend with failure in a way that we don't take it to heart so greatly. I feel myself and a lot of people, we wrap a lot of our ego and our self-worth up and whether a situation works really well for us or doesn't.
- Whitney Hess:
- Yeah, I appreciate you mentioning ego and wrapping up self-worth in the outcomes. I think a big place where I had an opportunity to work on that was when I was training to become a coach. So as you mentioned New Ventures West, it's a year long certification programme and in the first quarter of that year, you are working on your own self-development before you're learning any methodology or frameworks with which to coach others. And the biggest developmental edge for me at that time was shifting in my way of being from a consultant to a coach and as a consultant and especially as a UX consultant, I was an expert. I held on to my expertise very tightly. That's what I was getting paid for. And as a coach, it's not at all about my expertise. In fact, it's not about me at all. And that has been so freeing and I think that in the past decade now that I've been practising coaching full time, which it blows my mind that it's been that long, I think that that's a big part of how I am able to articulate this relationship that I have with failure now because let's say for instance that I were to have an initial consult with a prospective client and I decide you know how this is going to work out.
- They're going to go do this and then they're going to do that, and I've seen this all before. I know the pattern and then I determine for myself that that's the outcome that I want to see. And then in six months of working with them, everything I'm doing and saying is in an effort to try to create that new reality for them and then their life takes them in a totally different direction. And by the way, they know what's best for them and then I am somehow a failure in the relationship. I mean, it just wouldn't make sense. There needs to be a total non-attachment to outcomes in my work. Now as a coach, I am not the expert and another person's life. I'm not an expert at their career or how they should be designing their career or what mission they should be on or who they should be working with.
- I have ideas, opinions, resources, insights from having done this work across so many different organisations now for so many years, but it's all a mystery to us. And so I do have a coaching programme that I craft in the beginning of an engagement that spells out what the intended outcomes are and what the shift is that we're trying to make. But oftentimes something completely different unfolds. A person who comes to me and says, I absolutely must get out of this company. I need to find a new job tomorrow, may end up finding a way to work in a much more loving, caring, self-loving way in a new way with a new way of being within their existing environment. Other times people say, oh, I'm not looking to leave here. I love it. I would love to be here for the next five years. And then in the first couple sessions we discover it's completely toxic and they need to run. So everything is evolving, life is evolving. And so this notion that I should be able to predict the future that's saying, oh, I failed, is essentially an equivalency of I should have been able to predict the future and I predicted it wrong, therefore I'm wrong. And so not having my ego and wrapped up and my identity wrapped up in outcomes has just been so liberating that I get to be here in this moment with you and just watch what's going to happen and be entertained and curious and amazed at how life works out.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I wonder about that. So not having any expectations or assumptions about clients makes a lot of sense when you're in that coaching relationship with them. I totally connect with that and understand what you're saying. I was wondering though, if there's ever been a situation where a client has said something, told a story, or you've been reflecting on a session afterwards where something's happened and it's made you reconsider your personal assumptions and your personal expectations, so not the ones you hold for them or that you're trying not to hold for them, but things that are deeply connected to yourself and who you are.
- Whitney Hess:
- 100%. In fact, I say all of the time that I get as much if not more out of the coaching engagements than my clients do. It is an odd thing because on the one hand, the relationship is we try to make it a real power with paradigm. We are equals. We are peers, we are partners on this journey together, and yet there is a power differential in that they're the one paying for service. I'm the one providing the service. And so it sometimes can be seen as if I know something they don't know or I have something they need. And in actuality, the exact opposite happens in almost every single engagement. What the person is working on is what I need to be working on. The resources that they're engaging with are what I need to be engaging with. I consider it to be such a privilege to be in a position to encourage them along their journey because it really requires me, it's a job requirement, number one job requirement to be doing that work myself.
- And it's always a mirror in some way. Now, we may have our own circumstances, our own life experiences. Of course there's always differences between us, but there's nine out of 10 times a moment in the coaching engagement where something happens and I think, ah, this is why I have this client. This is what it's here to teach me about me. This is the work that I need to be doing. This is what I needed to remember about myself, about life, about work, about my place in the universe. It's a constant experience of remembering and relearning and reconnecting with myself that I feel so privileged and honoured to get to do as my work, how I make my living. There's some kind of cognitive dissonance there in that I get so much out of it personally that it's like, this feels like it should be more about you, but hopefully my clients would say that I make it very much about them. But in my own self-reflection, I really very, very often see how much it applies and quite frankly reminds me time and time again of how universal the experience of being alive really is. Despite cultural differences, despite geographic differences, gender, religion, age, you name it, we have such a universal human experience and I feel grateful to be able to tap into that and remember that every day.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I imagine being a coach is somewhat similar to being a researcher in the sense that you're dealing with people in their sort of universal human experiences and how they think and feel about what it is that they're going through in any given moment. And like a researcher, my projection is at least you kind of have to be keyed in to what someone is saying to you in that moment or you might miss something that's critical, some sort of mirror that you might be able to hold up for them in that particular moment. How do you make sure that you are stepping into those sessions with your best self, that you are walking through that door, virtual or otherwise with your best self together and ready to listen and ready to go?
- Whitney Hess:
- I love that you're recognising the importance of that. And I will say, I sometimes hear people say things to me like, oh, when you left ux, and I do not see it that way because so many of the skills that I was utilising and honing as a UX practitioner are the exact same skills that I'm utilising now. And I appreciate you noticing that. And I will say even before I was in user experience, I was a professional writing major in undergrad and I was doing journalism. I was writing for the local alternative Newsweek, the Pittsburgh City paper, and I was interviewing artists and I worked on the staff and faculty newspaper at my university at Carnegie Mellon, and I was telling stories of what they were going through and then those skills I was utilising when I was conducting user research. So now as a coach, it's different in that when I was conducting research, the thing that I really had to be tuned into was what the customer's need were with regards to the product or technology that I was hired to be working on.
- Of course, there was a need to have a much broader understanding of their humanity, which we were then bringing back into the company to make sure that they understood and appreciated. But when it came to really understanding the issues that they were facing, it was with the intent of solving a problem with regards to their interaction with the company. As a coach, it's different in that I don't have any agenda. The only agenda that I have with my clients is to love them and to trust them and to help them to love and trust themselves. So those listening that I'm doing is not to answer a specific question that I'm holding that then permits me to move forward with my work in the way that I need. It's really about being present to the totality of the person that is arriving in that moment and how I was trained to do that.
- And what I have found in the last decade and how I continue to do that is doing the work on myself. So if I am not feeling well, if I am replaying an argument that I had with someone, if I'm stressed out about something that's about to happen, or if I'm under-resourced in any way, my full faculties are not available to receive my client in every way, and I'm using all of my senses when I'm with my clients. And I will say all of my client sessions are over the phone. I work with people around the world, but we are on audio only. And that is part of what helps me hear much more deeply. I am not distracted by what I look like and what they're looking like, and I'm not thinking what are they seeing right now? And all the things that happen in video chat, I am listening with my whole body to their whole body, and I've received a lot of training on this, but it also is something that I think comes naturally to me and allows me to utilise my cognitive mind, but I'm also really utilising my emotional intelligence, my somatic intelligence.
- All of my senses are coming together to fully receive the person as honestly and truthfully and deeply as possible. And so sometimes a thought pops into my head that doesn't make any rational sense. It's not the obvious next question in the rhythm of the conversation, but it's there and have to honour that it came from somewhere. And it's almost always in that moment when I say, why am I wondering X, Y, Z? That they say, oh, and drop into a deeper truth and a deeper awareness about something that they maybe were talking around kind of circling the drain around, but they weren't really getting to the heart of the matter because we have all built up these, I don't know, habits that keep us from looking at the things that are most painful, most profound, keeping us safe from deeper levels of success sometimes. And that's when things really open up and we start to see things in a totally new dimension.
- So it's about honouring the truth of where I am in any given moment. When we came onto the call today, I said to you, I think I've got allergies. I'm stuffy, depending on how bad it was, if I didn't feel like I could self connect in an authentic way, I might've asked to push the conversation. And part of what I appreciate about running my own business and having these one-to-one relationships with my clients is that when I'm not fully resourced and I know that I can't be fully present for them, I'm able to move things around. So it's really about, again, number one job requirement, doing the work on myself to ensure that I am at my best so that I can show up and fully hear everything, not just that's being said, but also the things that are being said and the things that I'm hearing in kind of an alternative or deeper sense. They're sometimes referred to as the Claires clairvoyance, Clair Sance really tuning into something else is present here that I'm feeling. And I don't know what it is, but I suspect you might. Let's take a look at that. And it's interesting work,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- No doubt, and it's almost uncanny hearing you describe that ability to hear or that question comes to you that doesn't fit with the flow or the rhythm of the conversation and that it unlocks this ability and the person you're speaking to go a level deeper and actually deal with the topic that is more substantial, the one that actually needs to be tended to. I've just started reading a book called Crucial Conversations. I think I'm only
- Whitney Hess:
- Book,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, right. So I'm only four or five chapters in. But even then just hearing you talk about that, it's reminding me of something that I've read in that book about making sure that you're having the conversation about the thing that you want to talk about because it's very easy for us to duck and dive and dodge and talk around and get distracted by all the other things that we could be talking about without addressing that key issue. And it sounds like you've keyed in you somehow you've developed this way of keying into that, which must be somewhat of a superpower.
- Whitney Hess:
- Thank you. I don't understand it completely, and I am very grateful that it seems to exist. I seem to have access to it. I don't necessarily see it as being something that is a part of me or is me. It's more so I'm able to tap into the interconnectivity of all of us. Somehow I'm able to plug into the network of which we are all a part of, and the energy flows through that and the information comes to me. And like I said, when I'm under resource, I find that I can't fully plug myself in. And so you're not getting all of my energy and all of my capacity in those moments. And then it's not entirely fair to move forward. We have to take a pause or reschedule or whatnot, but part of ensuring that I'm showing up resourced is doing things like eating right, getting enough sleep at night, moving my body, breathing fresh air, being outside as much as possible, having loving connecting time with my partner, having that time with friends and family, honouring the whole of who I am as a person so that I feel good about myself and love myself as I'm arriving at those moments with my clients because what position am I in to help them love themselves more deeply if I'm not loving myself?
- I mean, it's a tricky thing to do. And I imagine that there we're probably aspects of that that were arising when I was conducting user research. I think that it's very easy to fall in the trap of here's the script, here's the widget that I know that I'm supposed to be designing or reporting on. And so let's make the conversation about that. And I remember one time I was working on this project for a startup that sadly no longer exists, but they were a carbon footprint calculator and I was conducting user interviews and one of the people that I was interviewing was a new mom and she was talking about how she wants to leave the planet a better place for her children, and yet she's so busy with everything that she's now doing as a mom that she's not really able to do a lot of typing as much.
- She's doing more scrolling one handed and she checks Facebook while she's breastfeeding. And had I been just following the script and not really curious about the person that was in front of me and present with that person, I don't think we would've ever come to that realisation. But then I was able to take that insight back to the client and say, I think that this might need to be more flexibility here, that it can be a consuming experience and not just an inputting experience because there are going to be people who are doing this while they're doing many other things. And they may, and this is early mobile days, and had I been following the script, I probably don't think we would've ever gotten to her talking about her breastfeeding. So I think that there must have been this curiosity about people and passionate about people and wanting to be empathetic and connected with people in front of me that has always been present in my life even before. I suppose it's probably what led me to coaching rather than it being a skill that I've built since I've been in coaching. I don't know,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's this idea it sounds like of prepare. So do the script. I don't know if you could tell Whitney, but I like to do my preparation.
- Whitney Hess:
- Yes, I love that.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Give yourself the permission, the self-trust to put that in the drawer and then go with your instinct and with what you are hearing and trust yourself to process and direct a conversation in real time, which I think perhaps comes with experience. It's certainly not the way I felt about even these conversations on the podcast for many episodes, but it's something that I think if you can allow yourself to do, you can, as you've described there, you can start finding things that just gold and you otherwise wouldn't discover if you're too rigidly sticking to a plan.
- Whitney Hess:
- Yeah, absolutely.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I want to come back to something that you said a little earlier on, which was to do with being plugged into the network. Very Matrix s here. Yeah, right. So I understand that because of where you came from professionally in UX before you started coaching, that many of your clients over the years have come from our field and that you still feel from what you've said today, even quite deeply connected to the field of UX and design. As you know, things have been changing in our field. They always are let's not mischaracterized things, but they've been changing perhaps in many people's perspectives for the worse in the present moment. It certainly feels like that for many people around. And I was wondering what the big issues were or the themes that you've seen emerging, the challenges. I mean there are probably some obvious ones in terms of the job market, but what have you been hearing from clients over the past 12 months?
- Whitney Hess:
- Well, firstly I will say that UX does not exist in a, we are a part of the wide, wide world and the world is in a poly crisis right now. So that UX is also experiencing challenges is to be expected because we are all collectively going through something. It's been over four years since the start of covid, which is mind boggling to think for years have passed and for many lives have changed dramatically and work has changed dramatically, and it's never going back to the way that it was. So we are very much still catching up and adapting to a new normal that isn't really even a new normal because there is no norm anymore. The norms have not yet settled if they ever will again. And so we are all trying to figure out what is professionalism today, what is work today? What is my relationship to my work when it's all happening right here in this room, in the place where I live, where my family is, where I eat my meals, everything.
- And for some it has been a tremendous gift to have that flexibility in their lives for various reasons. For others, it has been a huge burden. I have a fair number of clients who are in conflict with the expectations that their employers have of them in the way that they work today. They want to be in choice, and quite frankly, they need to be in choice because what life is expecting of them today in 2024 is very different than what it was expecting of them in the beginning of 2020. The rest of their lives have changed dramatically and they need to be able to show up for the whole of their lives, not just for their work. And when you see such dramatic layoffs we're coming on two years now, it's been two calendar years of these layoffs, one after the next. Many people that I know in the field are now on their second, third, fourth layoff During this time, the commitment and loyalty that many of us believed we were required to have to an employer is coming into question because clearly it is not a mutualistic relationship.
- And there are a lot of folks who are incredibly dedicated, talented, experienced senior who are struggling to find work, decent work, and they have been willing to take pay cuts. They've been willing to take title cuts. They've been willing to work outside of the domains that they had been building a career in, and they still are struggling to find something. My understanding of why we are here and how we are here is probably far from accurate, but my current viewpoint on this is that even 10 years ago, this field was incredibly niche. You did not have high schoolers 10 years ago saying, I want to be a user experience designer when I grow up. And now we have people going into university for UX and related work. Those of us who've been in the field a long time worked very hard for this field to be recognised and valued.
- And as a result, there has been a huge expansion of the field. There was a time when I remember I was doing some research for a blog post and I went on LinkedIn and I found that there were maybe 20,000 people that I could find with user experience or something in their title. There's got to be at least 500,000 people with UX in their title. Now, I don't know that number, but it's got to be at least that many. There's bootcamps and formal educational programmes and certifications, and there's just been a proliferation of ways that people are training to become UX practitioners, which barely existed. When I was entering the field, I had a master's in human computer interaction, and at the time that was very rare. My programme that I graduated from was 10 years old at the time. So the market is oversaturated.
- There are a lot more people here with the skills to do the work. And then we have ai. I cannot claim to understand the depths of how AI is changing this field, but I am certain that companies are choosing to invest in AI over research because they have a narrative that AI is going to save them money. That's never been our narrative. We have not embraced the business case for what we do so widely. We have been very moralistic about what we do. We do it because it's the right thing, because empathy is the right thing because human-centered design is the right thing. And we have not made a strong enough business case for how we save businesses money and how we make businesses money. And then you have a proliferation of AI tools that are saying, we can save you time and you can cut 400 people because now it can all be done in seconds.
- And I think it is a time in the world and in the field and in technology where there's a lot of change happening very quickly and it's going to be more time until we see where we will all shake out. But having said all that, I am a big believer that human skills and human centeredness will always prevail. It may come in and out of fashion, but I believe that just like nature, everything is a cycle. We are in a cycle now where we're in the downturn, but I do believe that once there is more maturity of these AI tools and practises and where there's more regulation and sort of an evening of how this is utilised, there will be a return to, okay, we have really underinvested in understanding the needs of our customers, and computing alone is not going to be able to offer us that.
- So we need to reinvest in the people who can support us. But I think it's going to look very different. I think the tools that we use are going to look very different, and the people that I see thriving right now in their careers and getting hired are embracing that change rather than railing against that change. I see a lot of people who I love on LinkedIn every day writing diatribes about how disappointed they are, and I just don't see that as being an effective way forward. We have to accept that we are where we are and band together and do something positive to empower one another to move forward in ways that are meaningful to us.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It all sounds very dark, doesn't it? And I hear what you're saying around what it sounds like, at least the reductionism of the work that we do, the people that we're trying to design for the employees of businesses to management by spreadsheets and that being only lens, the numerical lens being the only lens, the way of framing what it is that we're all currently doing and who we're doing it for. And I think there are examples in recent history of the dangers of removing that human narrative from the way in which we frame people more broadly. I want to touch on something to do with that human aspect while we still have it in our organisations. Let's hope that it always stays that way. And that was something that you said when you were interviewed on the Good Morning UX podcast and it was about how people have different mental models around the leadership relationship that they have with the people that they're managing and that there are sometimes, and probably, I dunno how prevalent this is, you tell me, but there are sometimes people out there in people management roles that don't believe in having deep relationships with the people who report to them, the people they lead.
- This is intentionally provocative, but could they be onto something because people are messy, people can be trouble. It's hard work trying to understand other people. So could these people, could these managers actually be onto something by keeping their distance?
- Whitney Hess:
- I appreciate the question and I think that the answer is it depends. Classic UX answer, it depends on what the company needs. It depends on what the appropriate culture is for the company. I don't purport to say that every company requires such a deep intimate company culture. I think that it depends on what the objectives of the company are, on what domain it's in, on who the customers are, on what product it or service it offers. However, the issue is when there is a mismatch between the leader's behaviour and the best culture that would support the company. So I don't think that there's necessarily anything wrong with a leader who respects their people's privacy, who is a bit more hands off. It isn't forcing intimacy, isn't trying to get to know their personal lives of their people, who is a bit more reserved to waits for people to come to them.
- I think that's style and it's acceptable so long as when someone has a need that they feel safe to bring it to that person and that the person receives them and listens and supports them to the best of their ability. The issue I think is when that leader is not just hands off but arms length, that's your problem over there. And I occasionally have clients with managers at very high levels of an organisation who have no interest in being people managers, despite the fact that they have direct reports. They just don't as a people manager, even when they have direct reports. And that is problematic because it is not the same thing as managing a project or managing a product. They're human beings and they're complex and they have lives outside of their jobs that can bleed into their performance and their ability to be present for their work.
- And they come from different cultures and backgrounds, which means that they show up with different customs and different relationships to work and what it means to be a professional. And if you have a leader who is completely uninterested in people, then they probably should not be in a position to manage others. There are many companies out there that have career matrices that allow folks to rise in seniority without ever becoming managers, without ever having direct reports. And I think that's a very healthy thing because people do need to have an opportunity to grow and another title to attain in a way to be recognised for their contributions and achievements within the company and really incentive to stay with the company long-term without ultimately being promoted into a position of managing people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I just wanted to say, it seems like when it comes to that practitioner track versus the manager track that perhaps when it comes to design practitioners who are more on the visual end of our field, more visual craft end of our field, that there is a shelf life there for them, or at least there's not the same opportunity and therefore there's, this is an assumption, so challenge me on this if you need to. There's this draw towards the management track in order to further career aspirations, to earn more money to be seen, to be of more value to the organisation and to avoid falling off that, what can be quite a steep cliff in terms of relevancy when it comes to the practise of design craft, the visual side of it, what risks, if any, do you see to practitioners or have you experienced through the practitioners you've been coaching of them not pursuing the management track as they age?
- Whitney Hess:
- I think it's quite the opposite. I see a risk with people pursuing the management track when people are not their passion. And in fact, quite a few people come to me with the intent of moving away from managing people. They've been promoted into that role because it was the next available role for them. And because they were exceptional at their craft, the irony of someone's exceptional at what they do, so promote them out of actually doing that work and now doing something that they had not only no experience doing but no interest doing. I see much more of a threat to people's careers when they move away from what they are passionate about and what their gifts are. And I have quite a few number of clients where the engagement is around helping them to reconnect with their love of the craft and reconnect with themselves as the craft person.
- The caveat being they have to be in the right environment where that is understood, appreciated, and valued. So only when they are determined to remain within a company and they are avoiding being promoted into a manager role, do we then talk about, okay, well is this about fear and how can we help you to overcome those fears? And perhaps it's that they have not had role models of the kind of leader that they would want to be, or maybe they believe that there's only one way to be a leader. So the coaching engagement becomes about showing them the whole array of possibilities of the kind of leader that they can be and developing their own style in a way that feels authentic and good for them so that they can be in integrity in that role. But otherwise, it is really more often than not about acknowledging that the environment that they're in is not a place where they can continue to grow in a way that's meaningful for them. And it's unfortunate, but true that there are fewer companies out there where craftspeople can grow without taking on manager responsibilities for the entirety of their career. But that's when I see people start their own practises or move into a collective or take on work in a different format than being within the confines of an organisation that's dictating the work that they do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- This is one of those random thoughts that I think you were touching on earlier, but it's making me recall when you were talking about how work has fundamentally changed since Covid and it's not going back the way that it was and that people have realised this is maybe me where I'm following this thread along here on my own here, but people have realised that more in different ways of working are possible. And I couldn't help but thinking it sounded like then. And for some reason what you were saying there triggered this thought now that it's like we've almost realised that we've all been operating in Stockholm syndrome
- And that we've all woken up and walked out of the prison and realised what actually was going on and now we don't want to go back into our cells. It also struck me from what you've been saying, this whole conversation and obviously getting a feel for you as a person. This is the first time that we've spoken, right? Many people don't understand that. I don't often speak to my guests before we jump on and record these shows. So getting this real sense of care, this sort of deep sense of care and empathy for you, and given the line of work that you've chosen, I mean, how could you be callous in this kind of line of work where you're dealing with people in their careers? And this is why I wanted to bring up something else that you've said and not to suggest that this is not in caring part, but I was curious about this quote, and here we go. You've said a long time ago, I made a commitment to myself that I am not in the business of saving a company or a person that does not want to save itself. Some companies, here we go, people this is it deserve to die, and some leaders maybe shouldn't be leaders, which of course that follows on from what we were talking about previously. What caused you, that's quite strong language, that's quite evocative. What caused you to make that commitment to yourself?
- Whitney Hess:
- I love that you pulled that out. And I am a New Yorker, so I do have a tendency for strong language, and it's very rare that people don't know the point that I'm trying to make because I'm rather direct. I don't think that just because a company was conceived of and a bunch of people got together and they raised some money and they made some money that it deserves to exist forever. Just like every idea that someone has doesn't need to be executed on. And everything we can do with technology doesn't mean that we should. Just like what you were saying around ai, AI needs to be done responsibly and ethically, and there are some things that we shouldn't be able to do. I don't think that individuals should be able to buy automatic rifles. I mean, just because the technology doesn't mean it's something that we should use.
- So similarly, I don't think that every idea that every business owner has ever had deserves to be a business. And I don't believe that every business owner deserves to be running a business that doesn't feel like a provocative statement to me when I say it, because I think that there is a lot that one has to earn when they are running a business and any level of that business earn the privilege to have the power to make decisions that impact people's lives. And I have seen many companies that I had the potential to work with as a UX consultant who wanted to hire me so that they had a box checked, oh, we did ux, but they didn't want me to speak with any of their customers. I'm sure that that's not news to anyone who's listening. It's like, oh, research, we don't need that.
- You're the expert. You should just know how to design it. Just design it the right way. And we don't actually need to talk to anyone or listen to anyone. And in those times, I avoided working with those companies. I would actively turn down jobs. And I do that now with prospective coaching clients who in the first conversation say that everything that's going wrong in the company is because of all the people who are working for them, and they take no personal responsibility whatsoever. Those are not people that I need to be working with. Not everyone is the right client for me, and I'm not the right coach for everyone. And not everyone should be a leader, and not everyone should run a company, and not every company should exist. If it's doing more harm in the world than good, it shouldn't exist. That doesn't feel provocative to me. I believe that what we do as human beings collectively is to try to make the world better every day, to evolve, to create more love, to create more harmony. If people are actively working against that, they should not be in a position where they are enabled to cause harm.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- There. I was thinking that it was all about extracting as much value out of it as I could for me. Well, this might be provocative potentially for the people that have done this before, but I laughed when I heard you talk about remedial coaching where you'll sometimes get referred, someone almost sent to the headmaster's office kind thing, right? You've got to go see the principal, you've been a naughty employee, you need some coaching. And you flipped this and you said that almost 100% if not 100% of the time, it's the person who referred the she that actually needs the coaching. Tell me about that.
- Whitney Hess:
- So a lot of people who have not had experiences with coaching firsthand may have only heard of coaching in a remedial context because 30 years ago when the field was still very new, that was often how it was being used. So someone is on a performance improvement plan, therefore they need a coach. Firstly, I do not work with anyone who is not actively choosing to work with me. It is just not possible to be successful. And oftentimes the performance issues, and I'm putting quotes around that, that someone might be portraying are the result of it being a bad fit. They don't have a positive relationship with their manager. They're not in the right role. It's a poor fit with the company culture. There's something going on in the company that's causing them stress or there's something going on in the rest of their lives. So it's usually things that we can't even address in a coaching engagement unless they leave.
- I'm not just as when I said that statement that you just quoted before around that I'm not in the business of saving companies, that was because I realised what I was running my own business early on that I needed to take on jobs where I at least had the potential to be successful. Let me be the one that screws it up rather than there was no chance in the first place. What would be the point of that? I'm wasting their time. I'm wasting my time. I would much rather put my energy into something where there is the possibility of a positive outcome for everyone involved. So there is a sort of assessment that I need to do when someone, other than the person who would be receiving the coaching, is reaching out to me about a prospective coaching engagement. Now I work with lots of organisational clients where I have one contract with the organisation and I'm coaching several leaders simultaneously.
- One-on-one, and then we're also doing team coaching together. And in all of those cases, I make clear to the sponsor, meaning the person who brought me in, that there's two rules of engagement here. One, you and I are also doing coaching together because there is no world in which I can coach your team and not you and for it to be a positive benefit on the team, it just doesn't work that way. I have to understand all sides of what's happening. So that's rule number one. And rule number two is people have to opt in to work with me. Rule three is, and you sponsor are not going to know about anything that I'm talking about with anyone at any point. There's no documentation, there's no report, there's nothing that gets sent to someone's employer file or anything like that. But those first tool rules are essential because otherwise it presumes that there is a problem or skill building development that needs to occur with people other than the sponsor, which doesn't make sense.
- And then simultaneously, if I am being assigned as a coach to someone, it may very well be that we are not a fit. And it wouldn't make any sense for me to take on an organisational coaching engagement where I'm requiring someone to work with me, where in the first couple interactions I can see that we're not right for each other. I have a little thing framed on my wall that says I'm not for everyone because I have to remind myself sometimes that I have a big personality, I have a particular style, I have particular training in the way that I operate as a coach. That doesn't mean that I can support everyone on planet earth. There are some coaches who are just better fits for some people. So it needs to be a double opt-in relationship where we are coming to it saying, you are who I want to be working with on both sides, and only then can it be successful.
- I too early on in my time as a coach, I discovered that from bad experiences. I'm very lucky that I don't often need to learn the same lesson twice. I'm very good about that. Once I learn a lesson, I change my behaviour. And so I have kind of some systems in place that ensure that I'm getting that clarity before I make the commitment. But one sort of caveat, I guess is the word for that is when I do what I call sponsored employer coaching, which is when I'm not working with the whole team, but the employer of my client is paying, and I have several examples of those. One that's starting right now where the individual who I'm going to be coaching came to me to work together. I spoke with their manager and I spoke with the head of HR at the company. I'm not going to have relationships, coaching relationships with that manager and that head of HR because they are not hiring me to coach the team. They are essentially reimbursing my client for a coaching engagement that's entirely for them. So that's the only case in which I'm not requiring that I'm coaching everyone involved, but if there were 2, 3, 4, 10 people that I was coaching within that company, the head of that team would also be a client. There's just no other way around it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- People have to opt in. It sounds like what you're saying is no coach spam.
- Whitney Hess:
- Yes. In fact, I'm realising that I've been listing off the number one rules about all of these things, but the number one rule that I heard when I first started coaching is that you cannot coach people without permission. So friends and whatnot that you're just having casual conversations with and they're sharing things about their lives. You can't just start coaching them without them saying, Hey, so can you put your coaching hat on? Yes. No, you cannot coach spam people. You can't require that people work with you because it's supposed to be for them. Even when it is an organisational engagement, the coaching relationship is still for the wellbeing of the individual before it is for the company. Yes, there is some intention around the change that they're wanting to see in the organisational culture, in performance in a variety of factors, but at the end of the day, it's for that individual more than anything else. And so we have to connect as people.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Whitney, I'm mindful of time. I'm going to bring the show down to a close now. I have one final question for you and it's got to do with one of the things that you attribute to the success that you've experienced in your own professional journey. And this is your ability as far as I understand it, to give yourself permission to take risks. And about this you've said, and I'll quote you one last time, giving yourself permission to go from something that you're good at to something that you are not sure you could be good at. But that's truly calling your heart is scary and it's where all the goodness is. And I am incredibly grateful that I have whatever that thing is instilled in me to trust myself to take those risks. And I think that's a big part of what I help unlock in my clients.
- Whitney Hess:
- So
- Brendan Jarvis:
- If you were coaching me right now, so this is me opting in, subscribing, giving you permission, and I needed, I was one of those people that needed to more of that kind of confidence, more self-trust. What would you say to me to unlock that?
- Whitney Hess:
- Firstly, I'm so glad I said that. I need to hear that all the time. Do you believe that there is any way in which you could want something that could be wrong for you?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yes, I can see that. Yep. In fact, I've done that with the benefit of hindsight. Yeah.
- Whitney Hess:
- So you've had experiences where you've felt drawn to something but then found out ultimately it wasn't right for you. Did those experiences cause you harm?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I caused myself harm through those experiences, yes.
- Whitney Hess:
- How are you determining that you caused yourself harm?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I believe it's through my belief that my actions are my responsibility and that as I've aged and reflected on the decisions I've made, if I was the same person that I am in the current moment, then I would've made better or different decisions.
- Whitney Hess:
- Right. But you weren't the person that you are now. Correct. You were the person that you were then. So it sounds like you experienced some harm from those experiences, but it also sounds like maybe you learned something about
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yourself. Hundred percent. Yeah, a hundred percent.
- Whitney Hess:
- Can you think of a scenario where what you did to cause harm to yourself was of greater consequence than what you learned that brought you to this moment?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I don't think I've crossed any boundaries that would tip it into being more harmful than the value that I received from the lesson learned.
- Whitney Hess:
- Okay. So that's interesting. So even though you are holding on to some of those past experiences with maybe some regret in how you handled the situation, and certainly with some hindsight that that's not how you would behave today, you learned something that was so valuable that it enabled you to shift your behaviour. Am I hearing that correctly?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You're hearing that correctly.
- Whitney Hess:
- Okay. So then what are you believing might happen if you follow this thing that's calling you now that you might cross that boundary where you cause yourself more harm than the good of what you learn?
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That's a good question. So let me try and summarise that question. So you are wondering, what am I concerned about might happen if I take the action I'm considering taken while still carrying the baggage or the hangover from previous actions or similar actions? Did I get that right? Yes. That is a question that I think I'm going to have to go away and think about more critically. I know this is very tricky. In fact, this is an interesting flip for me to be put in this hot seat. So specifically, and I know it's probably difficult for people listening. I haven't actually talked with you about any of the specifics of this scenario, but that is definitely something that I would need to go away and think about.
- Whitney Hess:
- It seems to me that the choices that you made in the past brought you to the wonderful moment that you find yourself in now, and it's worth trusting that if you do decide to take that next step, regardless of what consequences there may be, it sounds like the pattern in your life is that there will be more benefit than cost.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Whitney, what a conversation. Thank you for so generously sharing your stories and insights with me today.
- Whitney Hess:
- I'm so grateful for your time. Thank you so much, Brennan.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- No, it's been my pleasure. Whitney, if people want to connect with you after hearing all the wonderful things you've said today, if they feel compelled to reach out, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Whitney Hess:
- Email me, [email protected], add me on LinkedIn. We can connect. I wish I could say I was active on the other social media platforms anymore, but sadly not. I miss old Twitter, but I love connecting. Happy to hop on the phone with anyone anytime. And if there was anything at all that I shared that resonated or didn't, I welcome all the feedback. And Brendan, I'm just so grateful to you for so much care that you put into this process and this experience. I feel really understood and seen and allowed to share what is so meaningful to me. So you are certainly doing something that you are incredibly gifted at and I feel very honoured to have gotten to participate in it. So thank you.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Thank you, Whitney. A really, really special episode and to everyone who's tuned in, it's been great having you here with us as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including where you can find Whitney and also some detailed chapters so you can hop around to the parts of the conversation that you want to hear.
- Again, if you've enjoyed the show and you want to hear more great conversations like this with world-class leaders in UX research, product management and design, and now also career coaching, please don't forget to leave a review. They're really helpful. Subscribe, so the podcast turns up every two weeks in your feed. And also tell someone else, maybe just one other person that might get value from these conversations that we're having at depth about the show.
- If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on LinkedIn as well. Just search for Brendan Jarvis. There's also a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes, both on audio and on YouTube, or head on over to my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.