Please note that this CTO Coaching Circle is invite only.
As a CTO at a start-up or scale-up you are constantly facing new challenges. It can be difficult to know who to turn to for advice and support and it can be a lonely position at times.
We all need peers that we can learn from, bounce ideas off and get support from. They will encourage, inform and inspire us and give us the opportunity to do the same for them.
A CTO Coaching Circle helps you with these challenges by providing you with:
Your peers in the CTO Coaching Circle will have a diverse range of experiences, skills and perspectives and act as your trusted advisers to support you to achieve your goals.
You will receive feedback, reflections and insights from your CTO Coaching Circle to help with your personal growth and development.
The other members of the CTO Coaching Circle will understand your challenges and be able to offer you support and build your confidence.
Having the support of your peers will increase your resilience in the face of the inevitable ups and downs of being a start-up or scale-up CTO.
You will learn from your peers and accelerate the development of the skills you need to be an even better CTO.
Two 1 hr individual coaching sessions are included with your CTO Coaching Circle membership. You can use them whenever you need more in-depth support during the year.
A CTO Coaching Circle will be made up of 5-6 hand picked start-up or scale-up CTOs. These CTOs will have a range of experiences and perspectives to complement your own and will be able to act as your “brain trust”.
We will meet as a Circle once a month for 1 hr 45 mins. In each session we will work on the challenges you are facing at the time. It will be an opportunity to share your challenges with one another, to share experiences, perspectives and insights and offer one another advice, support and guidance. I will facilitate each session and will support you to develop your coaching skills through this practice.
I will provide a private Slack channel to make it easy for you to communicate with one another between sessions.
I love my CTO Coaching Circle. I feel really supported by the members of the Circle and it is great to have a group of people that I know that I can share challenges with and ask questions of. The depth of discussions and range of different experiences that I get to tap into is invaluable.
The CTO Coaching Circle will be led by me, Joel Chippindale.
I am a CTO Coach with many years of experience leading CTO Coaching Circles and creating spaces where CTOs are able to support one another to thrive and develop in their roles.
I also have decades of experience leading software development teams, mainly in CTO roles at start-ups and scale-ups and so will also be able to share my own experiences in the CTO Coaching Circle where appropriate.
A year of CTO Coaching Circle membership includes:
Being a part of the CTO Coaching Circle has been very valuable for me.
Meeting regularly with other leaders and exchanging my biggest challenges with them has helped me bring new ideas to my team and enhance my existing practices.
I have been very busy in recent months, however, the monthly sessions are a meeting I never want to skip because they give me back time and energy to focus on my challenges. They are a great ROI on my time.
If you are interested in joining this CTO Coaching Circle or just finding out more then please book a call with me.
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Being part of one of Joel’s CTO Coaching Circles has been incredibly valuable. Alongside the direct support I’ve received around team and leadership challenges, what’s surprised me most is how much I’ve gained from supporting others - it’s boosted my confidence and reaffirmed my own experiences in ways I didn’t expect. Joel’s facilitation is excellent - thoughtful, well-prepared, and always creating a safe space for meaningful, and challenging discussions. I highly recommend it.
The CTO Coaching Circles are invite only. This enables me to pick a group of CTO’s who I believe will offer a really valuable mix of experiences, perspectives and skills to one another.
Everyone in the group will usually be the most senior technologist at a start-up or scale-up. They will have be managing teams from 5-60 people in size. They will be from across a range of industries.
No.
Members will usually each be the most senior technologist in their start-up or scale-up. They may have the job title of CTO, but they may also have the title of Head of/Director of/VP of Engineering or other equivalent title.
I hand pick the CTOs that I invite into a CTO Coaching Circle to ensure that it will be a group with a range of perspectives who will be able to support one another really well.
If you want to know who will be in your Circle before you commit to joining then you can find out. Let me know that you are happy to share your name with other prospective members, then I will be able to share those prospective members who have agreed to share their details with you. This enables you to find out who is likely to join your Circle.
Once we have confirmed who will be joining the Circle, we will find a regular time/day each month that works for all of you. We will ensure that this is in your normal working hours. This means that we will set the times/dates for sessions for the entire programme so that you can plan around them.
Circle sessions will be online, so you will be able to attend from wherever in the world that you are.
My intention is to keep the membership of the circle consistent in order to foster strong relationships between you. however under exceptional circumstances members may leave (see below) and so there may be some changes.
If the number of Circle members drops to less than 5 then, with the agreement of existing members, I will invite another CTO to join.
The topics that we cover will be chosen by you and the other members of the Circle. Typically you will share the topic, challenge or question that you wish to cover ahead of the session and we will decide, as a group, which to spend our time on. The number of topics we cover will vary per session.
Since the topics are chosen by you we can talk about anything that you would find valuable. To give you a flavour of the range of topics that you might wish to discuss here are some examples of past topics: