Kerry Van Voris

Coaching in the Clear

Jeff:

Today, we're speaking with Kerry Van Voris. For over 15 years, Kerry has been completely focused on the world of talent, attracting, placing, and growing people across the technology, financial and healthcare industries. Kerry is currently Chief People Officer at Oscar Health after leadership positions at Amazon, Microsoft, and Bridgewater. We'll talk about inspiring individuals and finding their loyalty to the purpose of an organization using that inspiration as a common thread for different styles of coaching, and the way that focusing on blind spots can be the best approach to increasing effectiveness. Kerry and I have known each other for almost a decade, and I am thrilled to have her join our conversation and share her wisdom. So Kerry, thank you so much for being a part of Coaching in the Clear and welcome to our podcast.

Kerry:

Thanks for having me, Jeff. I'm really happy to be here and having the opportunity to chat with you.

Jeff:

Fantastic. Okay. So let's just start at the beginning. What was your first experience with a coach?

Kerry:

When I think about coaching, I mean, for me it really comes down to sixth grade. You know, I was just a kid growing up and, and somebody, a friend of mine in school who happened to be in seventh grade, said, Hey, you should try out for the basketball team. And I'd never touched a basketball in my life and, you know, I didn't know anything and, and thought it was just kind of a, it would be like one night after school, a week and found myself found myself kind of playing basketball for two and a half hours a day after school. All due to the, the gentleman who was coaching the team and his name was it's, his name is Dave Margraf. And so that was really my first experience with a coach and outside of it being, you know, apparent or anything like that.

And, and so much of what he taught me and how he coached still rings true, actually in my personal and professional life. I mean, one of the, one of the biggest things that I, I realized about him is that he coached each one of us on the team very differently. And he was adept at recognizing what would motivate each one of us and how there were some of us that really responded to encouragement and positive reinforcement. And there were others on the team. Particularly one, one girl who was just an incredible athlete that that responded more to with the coaching. That was, that was really hard and actually was much more negative and much more about everything that she was doing wrong instead of pumping her up and motivating her too with encouragement. And I found that both super interesting and and also really effective.

Jeff:

So you bring up a great topic and what I've experienced over the course of doing these podcasts is typically this will come up later, but you just gave a great intro segue into it. So two things, one I want to explore what makes somebody coachable and you have a, you have a great perspective on that because as a leader at Oscar, you're a person who thinks about coaching and how coaching will work with leaders, et cetera. And so I want to talk about that. And then the other thing is in our coaching, at least we're sort of going in and we check for this when we're matching people, but we go in with a very clear goal. What we're trying to do is unleash your potential. And that means we're going to be focusing on trying to get you to find your individual point of excellence or greatness and drive you towards it, which means, you know, to do that, it's really hard.

And you've got to have a certain motivation to want to go down that path. And not everybody does want to go down that path. So we try to sort it out, but a lot of people don't want to go to coaching for that. A lot of people want to go to coaching for something else, for a safe space to explore issues, et cetera. And it sounded like this coach was figuring out, Dave was figuring out how to put together an incredible team where there were different motivations on the team, but ultimately he wanted the team to win and function well together. Am I, am I getting that right? Yeah.

Kerry:

That's exactly right. And he had to kind of handle each individual differently in order to get there.

Jeff:

So now let's take that to your, to your current life, to your professional life. When you're working with leadership teams and you're trying to put together this fantastic team, that's gonna achieve incredibly difficult goals. Oscar has done amazing things. You've worked at very distinguished, amazing organizations like Bridgewater and others. So you've actually been a part of teams that have, that have striven for excellence and know that they're going to have to work incredibly well together in order to get there, but are very different people and have different motivations to try to function well together as a team and achieve that goal. How do you, in that thinking like Dave, how do you take a look at each person around that table and think about what they need and what their motivations are.

Kerry:

Yeah. And, and it's, it kind of, there are just certain themes that I look for Jeff and, and the first one, the first one really is across the team. I look to ensure that each individual is aligned to the larger goal. I mean, that's one of the first things and just make sure that each individual believes in the vision of the company, or team or whatever it is, and truly wants to be part of it. I think that's, that's one, one the main thing. And then for each individual, when I think about coaching and what makes sense, and that could be, that could be hiring an external coach that could be individual one-off, you know, sidebar coaching from me, et cetera. The, the first, the, the first thing that individual has to have is just a hunger for improvement. They have to actually want it, like you mentioned, and want to evolve and want to improve.

And then secondly, I think, I think they have to have this raw openness to feedback, because like you mentioned, it's not, it's not, coaching isn't pretty things are gonna come up as you're being coached. Even as you're coaching others where just, just ugliness is going to come up or you're going to hear things that are really hard to hear. You don't want to hear. So someone having the openness to feedback is going to be a really important thing. And then, and then third for an individual, I think there's gotta be an awareness that, that each person has blind spots and they don't have to necessarily know what those blind spots are, because I think that's part of the, the excellent part of coaching is that you get to unearth those blind spots and then figure out what to do about them. But you have to at least have the awareness that we're not, none of us are perfect. And, and that each one of us has blind spots and, and, and coaching is part of the process to really identify those. And then, and then, then figure out what to do about them.

Jeff:

Awesome. So I've asked that question now, I think six, six different people, and the answers are similar and you're, I think you're answer encapsulates it particularly well. There's elements of the hunger, the drive for improvement, the desire to get better. And there's the humility of entering that arena and being open to what you're going to discover about yourself. It's more than curiosity. There's a humility to, like, I do have blind spots. I do have problems. I don't have it all the, all the answers and I have to enter that arena sort of understanding that and, and being okay with that....