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Coaching and mentoring are the oldest forms of learning, and probably as old as humanity itself. In recent decades, business coaching has experienced a renaissance, driven by the complexity of everyday business life and the use of technology in the coaching process.
Today I’m talking to Daniel Breitwieser, Director Automotive and employee no. 4 at CoachHub. CoachHub, provider of one of the world’s largest digital platforms for coaching, was a start-up a few years ago and is now a globally active company with over 600 employees worldwide.
Hello Daniel. The automotive industry is going through the biggest transformation since it was founded. At the same time, vocational training and corporate learning are not enough to prepare employees for the changes. What role can coaching play in this process?
Daniel Breitwieser: If you talk to the experts at conferences and read the studies on the subject, one thing becomes clear above all: coaching is change. Coaching is transformation. Everything else is the acquisition of knowledge and the acquisition of certain hard skills. These are important in day-to-day business. But when it comes to changing a business model, it’s about changing attitudes and beliefs, some of which have become dysfunctional in the new world.
If we succeed in changing our beliefs, attitudes and ways of thinking, then we can also change our behavior. And if behavior has to be changed in a transformation, then you need mechanisms that go deep enough.
Coaching to change mindsets.
Only coaching goes deep enough.
Because a professional coach doesn’t just deal with today, but starts processes over hours, over several months. And these lead one hundred percent to a change in the coachee, to a transformation.
Coaching also helps to change attitudes and mindsets, and therefore behavior. And when the behavior of managers and employees adapts, does the company actually change?
Daniel Breitwieser: Exactly.
So the person who coaches, their experience in business and their training are particularly important for success. How do you recognize a good coach?
Daniel Breitwieser: That’s a very good question, Steffen.
Coaches are a dime a dozen these days. And that is also a problem, because coaching is not a protected professional title. At CoachHub, we focus on systemic business coaching. I have been through the relevant certifications myself. We work exclusively with systemically certified coaches.
There are very strict quality criteria for this, which must be followed by accredited institutions that are defined, trained and monitored by international coaching associations such as ICF, ECA and EMCC. The training usually lasts 12 months and is expensive. There, the prospective coach learns the tools of the trade, the repertoire of questioning techniques and exercises, the process of coaching, gains initial practical experience and learns from the feedback of experienced coaches.there, the prospective coach learns the tools of the trade, the repertoire of questioning techniques and exercises, the process of coaching, gains initial practical experience and learns from the feedback of experienced coaches.
Our coaches have worked as managers for at least 6 years and have given at least 500 paid coaching hours. On average even around 1,000 hours.
It is important to have worked with employees at all levels. And we are doing quite well with this mix. We see this in our results, from average session ratings of 4.9/5 across thousands of reviews. On the one hand, we are known for our outstanding coaching quality in the industry. On the other, for our extensive international coverage. We now have over 3,500 coaches from 70 countries in our pool, coaching in over 60 languages.
Particularly in transformation projects, you should pay double attention to quality.
You were employee number four when it all started.
Daniel Breitwieser: CoachHub officially launched in August 2018. I joined at the end of September 2018. As part of the founding family, so to speak. The Niebelschütz brothers are entrepreneurs through and through, but also had stints at McKinsey and LinkedIn. As young managers, they benefited from coaching themselves. And then they asked themselves the question: Hey, why do coaches sometimes fly around the world and why is it so super difficult to find a coach, even though it’s such an important tool? Why is coaching only available for top executives and not across the board?
And in 2018, at a time when digital business models were springing up, they thought: let’s try virtualizing this using a video engine and see how it goes down with corporate clients.
And so CoachHub was launched and I joined early on.
We very quickly found customers who paid for it and developed a good product. However, there was still a lot of skepticism at the beginning, especially in Germany: is coaching via video even possible?
But our coaches demonstrated quality, and accordingly the customers were also satisfied and we were able to attract more and more and also secure large investments early on.
That was the basis for CoachHub.
The emergence of remote coaching.
We then scaled faster than others in Europe, especially in Germany. Thanks to coronavirus and the acceptance of video as a standard tool, we also tripled in size. In 2021, we acquired MoovOne, the largest player in France. That gave us a further boost. We can proudly say that today. There are large providers in the USA, but if you look at the global footprint, we are now at the forefront.
And that’s fun.
How important is a global footprint?
Daniel Breitwieser: We have scaled in many markets, made two acquisitions and now have a solid base. We opened our office in New York in 2022. Today, we have offices in all major markets in Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia and Singapore. With our global pool of coaches in over 70 countries, we can perfectly serve global players from Germany and around the world to reach the critical masses needed for transformation everywhere. We coach around the clock. At CoachHub, the sun never sets.
How has the product evolved from a coaching pool with a video platform?
Platforms offer the first opportunity to scale coaching. I haven’t seen a single company that has tried to scale coaching via a platform that has either been very successful or hasn’t run into extreme difficulties or costs. Because first you have to find the pool of coaches. Then you have to match the right coaches to the client’s managers and employees. This is impossible to do manually for thousands of employees. But it can be done on a digital platform. We not only have a coaching video, but also a matching algorithm that has improved over the years.
This means that whether 500 people want coaching or 5000, we can handle it. Every coachee can find their coach at the same time. Accordingly, we have efficiency in this process. This means that our clients can use coaching as a strategic, proactive and systematic tool to reach a really large number of people and develop new skills and the right behaviors across the board.
And at a higher speed than was previously possible. There are also other features on the platform: the location assessment based on 18 focus topics, which supports self-reflection.
Or the CoachHub Academy. These are short learning nuggets, content modules, e.g. on transformational leadership, positive psychology, problem solving, empowerment, performance, communication and much more, i.e. all the power skills that are really needed in a transformation process. These are videos, exercises and articles. We have developed unique content through our Coaching Lab and also have a partnership with Harvard Business Review. This means that hundreds of articles and tools can be used between sessions to deepen the work on the topics discussed. Our platform and all content is available in 15 languages.
Coachees can book their sessions directly via the platform. This is usually 45 minutes every two weeks. We offer an unlimited coaching model, so you can book as many sessions as you need. We also have coachees who do up to four or more sessions a month.
For the companies, our customers, we offer a dashboard that provides analyses of strengths and weaknesses in the company, skills development, feedback on the coaching sessions and much more. All in compliance with data protection and works council regulations, of course.
We are the German engineers of scalable coaching, so to speak.
Coaching = personal and professional growth.
The founders had their own personal experiences with coaching. Have you personally benefited from coaching?
Daniel Breitwieser: We practice what we preach. You can only talk honestly about coaching if you actually experience it. Every employee at our company has the opportunity to be coached. Personally, I’ve been doing about two coaching sessions a month since I started at CoachHub. For me, it has become part of my set-up. In fact, everything here is turned upside down every 6 months: new strategy, new colleagues, new product features – all of this is completely normal for us. And coaching helps me to find my compass and to continuously grow and perform in this turbo.
Can you give us an example of what has changed?
Daniel Breitwieser: Coaching has helped me enormously both professionally and personally. Without coaching, I wouldn’t be where I am today.
Because I had to grow quickly in my role at CoachHub. I’m 29 and responsible for large projects in the seven-figure range. Sometimes I have up to 50 people working on large accounts that I manage. Prioritizing where I go in and where I don’t go in is absolutely important for my personal performance. And of course there are also internal political issues. Having my North Star, knowing what’s important and what I can ignore, keeps me on track.
And it’s always about my career goals and how I can achieve them. It’s all about me. I had my last double lesson two weeks ago. And it was about how I can improve my performance. Procrastination, communication and time management – these are also always top issues. I can no longer imagine my coach out of my life.
Coaching has given you a guideline – despite high pressure and complexity.
Daniel Breitwieser: Exactly, it’s also about performance.
You have to, and there’s no other way. You have to find a way to deal with certain things – I’m not saying to ignore them, but a simple way to deal with them. And the ego can often get in the way. There are always issues that can knock you off track. And when that happens, it takes longer for you to get back to your performance or to come back to yourself, to be able to tackle things with full focus again.
Over the last four and a half years, coaching has helped me to develop my compass and to follow it. Despite everything that happens, to keep realizing that you are on the right path – and if not, to adjust things. It’s much easier to understand that there isn’t always a clear answer, but certain pieces fit together and there are adjustments. You just have to find them and then go in and change something. My coach helps me immensely with this.
Coaching@Scale in the automotive industry.
You have been working for the automotive industry for years. The automotive industry is all about complexity and target tracking. How do you see the topic of coaching via a platform, “coaching at scale”, in the transformation process in the automotive industry?
Daniel Breitwieser: The major customers I look after are OEMs and a few Tier 1 suppliers. We already work globally with most of the five largest OEMs in the world, as well as many Tier 1 & Tier 2 suppliers – in various forms.
It is becoming increasingly clear how well our model fits this industry. How well our coaches fit and how contemporary our concept is. It closes a real gap in the change management portfolio. We provide support in a wide range of applications: from the ramp-up of production of the new e-model at the Cologne plant as part of an enormous re-skilling and up-skilling initiative at Ford to Toyota’s sales transformation and the support of IAV in becoming a tech solutions provider. We see in many analyses that employees show a strong change in terms of change readiness after just a few months of 1:1 coaching.
Because the industry is of course undergoing one of the biggest transformations in its history. Especially here in Germany. That’s why I’m fascinated and motivated to work in this industry. There are so many jobs involved.
Of course, there are one or two companies here that are at the forefront when it comes to Electric Drive or New Mobility or whose products are already in high demand. But if we look at the major OEMs, it is of course a huge feat of strength for all of them, which will not be won over the coming months, but is more of a marathon.
But I believe that now is the time to set the course for the coming years. And that’s exactly where it’s so much fun to be involved. Coaching can be a game changer in the transformation. Because transformations fail or succeed not because of budgets or strategy, but because of “resistance to change”, or, as they say in German, the resistance to change.
And when it comes to management behavior and cultural issues in general, you have to go into depth in order to really get to grips with them and accelerate behavioral changes. That’s why coaching is so important in automotive. And today we can scale coaching – just like the automotive industry has scaled everything. We use the matching algorithm and the video platform to get efficiencies into the process. And in doing so, we improve quality because the entire process is data-based and we identify and implement quality improvements very quickly.
Changing mindsets to change behavior to change the business model at the end of the day.
Daniel Breitwieser: Exactly, there are many studies, including those by BCG and McKinsey, that have examined the success of transformation programs. 70-80% of the programs examined were less successful than the companies had planned.
And then again, there are studies on programs that have worked with coaching and had more success, even if it was difficult to scale coaching. The teams with leaders who were coached over a longer period of time were more successful and more satisfied. Because at the end of the day, there is a lot of talk about transformation, but walk-the-talk and providing a real role model over a long period of time is not easy.
There is not a single executive in Automotive that I have spoken to recently who has denied the effectiveness of coaching. I was recently at a conference where an executive from battery manufacturing said shortly after I asked him about it: “You don’t need to talk any further, culture and organizational development are my biggest construction sites.” The old world meets the new. We see that every day. “We need coaching, and not just for our managers, but for everyone.”
Behaviors that have developed over the last 30 to 40 years must now be broken down. That is a huge process. At the same time, we need external people who bring a certain skillset with them. Some of them come from other generations and often from other industries. There is often simply a clash. And we see this in the development of batteries, but above all in the establishment of large software organizations at the major OEMs. This requires completely new approaches.
Another manager from a software team at a premium OEM also told me that they face major challenges when implementing agile structures. The transition from hierarchical, top-down leadership behavior and the loss of status, power and influence is difficult for many. She reported on the many training sessions and workshops they conduct and how difficult it is to make the interventions sustainable.
She said that the behavior change is not coming down the road. In the past, waiting a little longer for change has worked. But with the complexity today and the simultaneous pressure on companies to succeed, rapid behavioral change is needed to accelerate delivery timelines and innovation cycles.
And this is precisely where “coaching at scale” is a game changer for the automotive industry, because behavioral changes can become firmly established more quickly.
The car industry needs a mental upgrade of the operating system.
Okay, Daniel, thank you very much so far. You can now write a letter that must be read by all board members in the automotive industry. What would you write?
Daniel Breitwieser: Well, first of all, I would congratulate everyone on the great success of the last few years. At the same time, I would point out that we now need to upgrade our mental software. I also call this an upgrade of the mental operating system. In principle, I compare it to our DNA. It is complex and is the way it is because it has matured over decades and sometimes even longer. And parts of this DNA will continue to function in the future and other parts of the DNA will no longer function.
And the top executives know this too. I recently had the pleasure of meeting the CEO of Vinfast at a conference. New players are entering the market, from Vietnam or China, with different ways of thinking, who are super agile, have super speed, who have good software engineers around them. We see the declining market share of German OEMs in China and know what lies ahead.
And that’s why we not only need the upgrade, but it also needs to come quickly.
And at CoachHub, we can do the upgrade at record speed because we make scaling possible and reach the critical mass faster that is needed to make new ways of thinking and behaving effective in daily doing.
Top executives in Germany talk so much in soccer analogies. Top teams, top athletes need top coaches. And we can also bring this model from competitive sport to the automotive transformation.
Thank you, Daniel, for this exciting interview. The topic of “coaching at scale” in automotive software projects hits a nerve. We should discuss this in more detail again soon.
Daniel Breitwieser: I also had a lot of fun. And yes: coaching at scale, especially in software projects, is super hot.
