David Evans Of New Level Work On The Top 5 Trends Shaping the Future of Coaching
An Interview With Chad Silverstein
Quantifiable Impact and Strategic Coach Deployment:
The effectiveness of coaching will become more quantifiable, thanks to advancements in data analytics and performance measurement tools. This trend towards measurable outcomes will enable organizations to more accurately assess the impact of coaching initiatives, leading to a more strategic allocation of resources. High-cost, one-on-one human coaching will be targeted at applications where the return on investment (ROI) is highest, ensuring that organizations get the most value from their coaching budgets. This shift towards evidence-based coaching strategies will also encourage coaches to focus on delivering measurable improvements, aligning their approaches more closely with the specific goals and challenges of the companies buying their services.
The world of coaching is undergoing a seismic shift, with emerging trends set to redefine its boundaries and possibilities. From digital transformation and the integration of artificial intelligence to the growing emphasis on mental health and the global rise of coaching cultures within organizations, these developments are reshaping the landscape of personal and professional growth. As we navigate through these changes, understanding the forces that drive the future of coaching becomes paramount. I had the pleasure of interviewing David Evans.
David Evans, Vice President of Product at New Level Work, leads the company’s product vision to foster thriving workplaces through better leadership. With a background in scaling company culture at Amplitude and founding tech companies, David brings over 15 years of coaching experience to support leaders through various business milestones. As a dedicated father of two, he sees parenting as his most rewarding growth journey yet.
Thank you for joining us. To start, could you share your “origin story” with our readers? How did you begin your coaching journey, and what challenges did you face in the early days?
I fell into coaching as part of my journey as a tech entrepreneur. In 2006 I was asked to coach tech entrepreneurs who were just starting out in my hometown, Adelaide South Australia, as part of a tech incubator. Then I did some presentation coaching for an accelerator for Australia and New Zealand companies here in the SF Bay Area. At that time I didn’t know coaching was a career pathway.
In 2010 I helped a friend bring his company out to the US and raise some money here, which I thoroughly enjoyed. We were at an angel investor breakfast one day and I met an executive coach who had accidentally ended up at the wrong breakfast. He told me what he did and it immediately resonated with me. That was the aha moment: the combination of realizing that what I enjoyed most was helping others, not being the leader up front, and discovering that coaching was a real job that people earned their entire income from.
I got my certification and started my coaching business in 2012, targeting tech entrepreneurs and other leaders in early stage tech companies. The first 2 years, like most businesses, were tough financially, the biggest challenge coming when our first son arrived late 2013. We’d been going backwards financially, fast, for 18 months. I could see things starting to turn around, and, sometimes it was hard to convince myself (and my wife) that we’d be better off staying the course rather than getting a full-time job at a tech company. Fortunately by around the 2 year mark I started to generate a great income, through coaching and more broadly leadership development work at larger tech companies. Back then this really was still a cottage industry driven largely by word of mouth. And it took time to build up a big enough book of business to sustain a growing family. There weren’t the coaching platforms that are around today to supplement your income. And the boutique coaching firms weren’t rushing out to offer newly minted ACCs work.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Curiosity: growing up I was always pulling electronics apart and putting them back together, experimenting with computers, and infinitely curious about how to connect with people. I love to discover new things. More than anything the breadth of my curiosity has enabled me to leverage knowledge from disparate domains to synthesize novel solutions. A good example is in my current role, applying AI to leadership development, combining my past experiments and learnings in AI and e-learning in my music technology company, with my leadership coaching and training experience and the talent management perspective I bring from my last role leading Talent Success.
Creativity: this comes out of the curiosity leading to synthesizing novel solutions. And, it enables me to translate the ideas into written and visual artifacts that serve as a north star for a team to execute, all rowing in the same direction.
Intensity: “You’re so intense!” used to feel like the worst criticism to me (granted it was usually intended as one). The intense passion I feel for growing and developing leaders fuels my dedication and persistence, especially during the challenging early days of establishing my coaching practice and in pushing through barriers to innovate and drive change within the coaching industry.
Can you share your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Why does that resonate with you so much?
“Everything happens for a reason — and the reason is everything else that has ever happened.” This quote from one of my spiritual teachers encapsulates a profound understanding of the interconnectedness of life’s events and personal experiences. Knowing this enables me to have empathy and act with compassion. People are born with what they’re born with and have the experiences they have. No one chooses either of these things and yet they’re the sum total of a personality, everyone’s every thought, feeling and action. This underpins my approach to coaching: fostering empathy, compassion, and patience, both with myself and others. This perspective helps me navigate challenges and conflicts with a clearer, more understanding mindset, promoting a positive, growth-oriented mindset in my coaching practice. This helps me see clearly when I feel angry (and as above I am so intense) and act from clarity instead of from a veil of anger. It helps me feel love and gratitude for everyone and everything, even when I don’t feel happy about a situation. The quote also helps me not jump to unnecessary meaning making and, instead of requiring a simple answer to the question why, to allow the complexity to unfold.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?
At New Level Work, we’re redefining the value proposition of L&D, aiming to transform it from a perceived cost center to a recognized profit center. By harnessing AI to pinpoint high-impact leadership development opportunities and augmenting our coaching capabilities, we’re democratizing access to high-quality leadership development. This not only broadens our reach but significantly enhances the effectiveness and scalability of our interventions, promising a profound impact on organizational success and individual fulfillment.
Without saying any names could you share a particularly memorable success story from your coaching career?
An early coaching client came to me wanting to become a tech founder. After discovery, it became clear that, while there was economic opportunity in the tech space, his strengths and interests lay in fashion. From there he identified a niche opportunity and, within 6 months had built a clothing business that he loved with 6-figure monthly income, which he continued to grow over the next decade. Jim Collins’ Hedgehog Concept applies to individuals as well as companies: focus on something you’re good at, passionate about, and for which there’s an economic need.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview about coaching. How has your approach to coaching evolved over the years, and what personal learnings have you applied to your own development?
When I first started coaching I had no formal training. I was doing a lot of telling and not a lot of listening. After going through coach training and certification, learning to listen deeply and ask powerful questions, I flipped the script. I was listening and asking a lot of questions but not sharing my experience and wisdom. Since then I’ve gradually integrated a mix of mentoring and training into coaching leaders. In areas a leader doesn’t have experience or training, it makes sense to weave in best practices and advice. That’s what we call directed coaching at New Level Work. It requires coaches with extensive real world leadership experience. And we’ve found the impact and time to impact are greatly improved with directed coaching.
How do you incorporate feedback into your coaching practice to continuously improve?
Primarily in 2 ways: firstly through continuous relationship design with my clients. The relationship starts with feedback on what the client wants out of coaching and how we’re going to be in relationship with each other in order to achieve it. It’s important to check-in periodically on how the relationship is going, holding mini-retros, continuously improving the efficacy of the coaching. Secondly, we send regular feedback surveys to all our leadership development participants
Can you discuss an innovation in coaching that you believe is currently underappreciated but has the potential to significantly impact the field?
Digital Coaching Platforms. While online coaching has become extremely popular, partly as a result of the acceleration of the shift toward remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic, the potential of fully integrated digital coaching platforms is still underexplored. Existing players, including New Level Work, until recently, have leveraged older web 2.0 technologies to move traditional coaching to the web using videoconferencing, messaging and content sharing platforms. In the future the digital coaching platforms that succeed will augment human coaches, using predictive analytics to analyze data about a leader’s past performance, organizational context, and preferences to create highly personalized and adaptive structures and extended learning paths to reinforce behavior change.
In what ways can coaching address the evolving mental health needs of diverse populations in a digitally connected world?
We have a research partnership with Harvard Business School that has uncovered disparities between the feedback white men receive and leaders from underrepresented groups receive. In 360 feedback processes, leaders from underrepresented groups receive more conflicting data, which makes it more difficult to make meaning of the data and translate insight into action that results in growth. This contributes to greater stress in underrepresented populations when receiving 360 feedback. On a positive note, that same research demonstrates that working with an experienced executive coach contributes to leveling the playing field, helping leaders from underrepresented groups parse the feedback constructively and leverage it to grow and develop.
How do you foresee artificial intelligence and machine learning transforming the coaching industry in the next decade?
We’re only at the beginning of this transformation. In the next decade, AIs will assist every relationship we’re in and we’ll all be in regular relationships with multiple AIs. Every coaching relationship will have bots managing the logistics, summarizing the sessions, creating accountability and behavior change structures, recommending extended learning. And we’ll all have our own assistants (probably multiple). Think of an on demand heads up display of feedback or, using audio, our own personal Tony-Hale’s-character-in-Veep, whispering everything we need to know in our ears. Coaches will be augmented. Leadership development will be accelerated. We will have more and better help to achieve the behavior change we want, create new habits faster, through hyper-personalized AI assistants.
What role do you believe ethical considerations and privacy concerns will play in the future of coaching, especially with the increased use of digital platforms?
They’re already playing a huge role. With the rise of generative AI, at New Level Work we’re seeing our customers’ infosec questionnaires double in size. Privacy seems like an even bigger concern for the corporation than for individuals, perhaps because we’re all so used to having our likes and dislikes harvested for personalized advertising. Transparency and empowerment are key. Coaching is all about empowering our clients to intentionally manipulate their own behavior. We must continue to put the client in the driver seat when it comes to using AI to support behavior change, being transparent about what the AIs are doing, making sure they’re working in alignment with the clients’ values, surfacing the impact of the choices they make.
Could you list and briefly explain “Top 5 Trends Shaping the Future of Coaching” based on your experiences and insights? If you can, please share a story or example for each.
Generative AI and Human Coach Collaboration:
Generative AI is set to revolutionize the coaching industry, particularly in areas focused on new skills acquisition. For leadership development, especially among emerging managers developing foundational management skills, the use of AI coach bots will become increasingly prevalent. This integration of AI into coaching will not only enhance accessibility of personalized coaching at scale but also exert downward price pressure on less experienced human coaches, who typically provide foundational level coaching. As organizations begin to leverage AI for early-stage coaching, human coaches may need to adapt, focusing on more complex, nuanced aspects of leadership and personal development where human empathy, understanding, and strategic insight are irreplaceable.
An example of this is New Level Work’s coach bot, which is being deployed to frontline managers, primarily in manufacturing and retail verticals that haven’t traditionally leveraged executive coaching.
Quantifiable Impact and Strategic Coach Deployment:
The effectiveness of coaching will become more quantifiable, thanks to advancements in data analytics and performance measurement tools. This trend towards measurable outcomes will enable organizations to more accurately assess the impact of coaching initiatives, leading to a more strategic allocation of resources. High-cost, one-on-one human coaching will be targeted at applications where the return on investment (ROI) is highest, ensuring that organizations get the most value from their coaching budgets. This shift towards evidence-based coaching strategies will also encourage coaches to focus on delivering measurable improvements, aligning their approaches more closely with the specific goals and challenges of the companies buying their services.
Premium Pricing for Expertise at Senior Levels:
As the coaching industry matures, the market will increasingly recognize and reward the value brought by highly experienced coaches, particularly those working with directors and senior executives. Senior leaders face complex challenges that require nuanced understanding and strategic insight — qualities that seasoned coaches possess. Our data indicates that coaches with significant business leadership and coaching experience have a much greater impact on the growth of senior leaders, compared to their impact on frontline managers. This disparity in effectiveness, which becomes more pronounced at higher levels of leadership, suggests that companies will be willing to invest more in coaches who can demonstrate a tangible impact on executive performance and organizational outcomes. As the ability to measure and appreciate this impact grows, the demand for seasoned coaches with a deep understanding of business strategy, organizational dynamics, and executive challenges will rise, leading to higher compensation rates for this elite group of coaches.
For instance, New Level Work works with senior leaders navigating through M&A activity. In these environments, the coaching focuses not just on individual leadership skills but also on managing the intricate dynamics of merging cultures. Adding group coaching to accelerate and smooth these dynamics, led by a coach with real world experience in mergers, is another way that we can attract higher prices as compared to all-you-can-eat subscription competitors. This type of high-impact coaching is increasingly seen as a valuable investment, with organizations willing to pay a premium for coaches who can deliver significant, measurable outcomes at this level.
Personalization
The future of coaching is digital, personalized, and data-driven. We’re moving towards a model where digital platforms not only facilitate coaching sessions but also provide personalized learning paths based on data analytics. Our platform tracks progress, suggests resources, and augments human coaches and trainers, helping to adjust coaching and training strategies in real-time. A great example of this is a platform we’re developing at New Level Work, which uses AI to tailor development plans based on an executive’s specific challenges and goals. This approach ensures that leadership development is not a one-size-fits-all solution but a personalized journey that evolves with the participant’s needs.
How do you envision the integration of coaching within organizational cultures changing the landscape of leadership and employee development?
The integration of coaching into organizational cultures is transforming leadership and employee development from a top-down directive to a more collaborative, continuous learning process. This shift is fostering environments where feedback is not only accepted but sought after, and where personal growth is aligned with organizational goals. For example, at a tech company we partnered with, coaching was embedded into the fabric of their leadership culture, leading to a significant shift in how teams communicated and collaborated. Performance reviews became developmentally focused check-ins, with managers serving as coaches, emphasizing growth and development rather than just performance metrics. This cultural shift not only improved employee engagement and retention but also drove innovation, as individuals felt more supported in taking risks and exploring new ideas.
What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the coaching industry today, and how might we overcome it?
There are still a lot of inexperienced coaches with no real world business experience being deployed in companies, especially to work with newer managers. This is partially driven by all-you-can-eat subscription business models, which result in a conflict of incentives between coaching platforms and the companies that hire them. With a gym membership model, it’s in the interests of the provider to minimize their costs, which means reducing the quality of the coaches and reducing the number of coaching sessions delivered. This can be overcome by measuring the business impact of coaching and paying for that impact rather than for the availability of the service.
What is one long-term goal you have for your coaching practice, and how are you working towards it?
My Linked-In headline is: “tcp==tcb; taking care of people is taking care of business” and I plan to prove that with hard data. When leaders show genuine care for the people in their organizations, people naturally want to go the extra mile and it increases the leaders’ engagement because it feels good. No one wants to be an arsehole. And being an arsehole is counter productive.
How can our readers continue to follow your work?
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeditrainer/
Thank you for offering such valuable insights into the future of coaching. We look forward to seeing your work continue to reach new heights, and we wish you continued success.
About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein is a seasoned entrepreneur with 25+ years of experience as a Founder and CEO. While attending Ohio State University, he launched his first company, Choice Recovery, Inc., a nationally recognized healthcare collection agency — twice ranked the #1 workplace in Ohio. In 2013, he founded [re]start, helping thousands of people find meaningful career opportunities. After selling both companies, Chad shifted his focus to his true passion — leadership. Today, he coaches founders and CEOs at Built to Lead, advises Authority Magazine’s Thought Leader Incubator, and launched and leads an online leadership development community which can be downloaded for free for iOS and Android.
