The Interview: Michael Bungay Stanier
On building a career as a best-selling author, speaker, and facilitator in the coaching industry.
Michael Bungay Stanier is author of the best-selling book The Coaching Habit, founder of MBS Works and founder of Box of Crayons. He shared more about his creative practice, self-publishing, and scaling for impact. Connect with MBS on LinkedIn. —Steph
Tell us about yourself.
My career is about unlocking the best in people, whether in yourself or others. I'm best known for a book called The Coaching Habit, so you'd call me a writer, teacher, facilitator, and an occasional coach. I live in Toronto with my wife but I'm from Australia originally, and went to university and did graduate work in the UK. I lived in Boston for a while but have been in Canada for the past 20 years. I'm the founder of a couple of businesses—one, Box of Crayons, a learning and development company that teaches the insights and tools from The Coaching Habit and another of my books, The Advice Trap. We’ve trained hundreds of thousands of managers to be more coach-like in organizations from Microsoft to Gucci. My other business, MBS Works, helps people find their next big thing.
What is your training and certification as a coach?
As a teenager, I volunteered and was trained for crisis counseling—a youth suicide hotline—and that's where I first learned about asking good questions and listening to answers, and understanding that there might be more to the story than what first shows up.
When I launched my career in London, first in product innovation and marketing, then in change management consulting, I began hearing about coaching, very much as a North American thing, and I got curious. When I moved to Canada in 2001, I did my coach training with the Co-Active Training Institute, became a certified coach, and built a practice. Turns out I didn't love running a coaching practice so dismantled it, but stayed committed to the idea of what it means to bring coaching skills to people because I think it's a powerful way of interacting.
Did you have an “a-ha” moment when you realized the power of the coaching model for yourself?
I don't think so, but it did become more and more obvious that coaching was something I thought was important. It played to a lot of my strengths and my beliefs, so that's how it pulled me in.
What didn’t you like about running a coaching practice?
It doesn’t scale as much as it might in terms of impact—but also in terms of revenue. And my real strengths are in teaching and writing.
What is your creative process like?
I'm known for my books, but I also create training programs, podcasts, and experiences. The best of what I do is come up with ideas and create—sometimes bigger projects, sometimes smaller. Creating is an everyday thing for me in many ways. I'll start with a pen and a blank sheet of paper. Broadly speaking, I’ll outline what I am making, for whom, and the desired outcome. Then, what will keep me interested—how do I make this something through which I can learn and grow?
And then, honestly, it’s lots of cycles of iteration. I go through a lot of paper, just sketching out shapes and designs and ideas for myself as a way of finding the right arc or the right through-line. It’s quite likely that I’ll write an entire book and abandon most of it several times over.
Tell me about the decision to self-publish The Coaching Habit?
It was less a decision and more the only option left because my proposal was ultimately turned down by my publisher. I’d self-published a book before, so the process wasn't completely unknown—although it was mostly unknown—and it felt less about the decision to self-publish and more about “this is a good idea … you should back yourself and take a crack at it.” Typically, if I'm asking myself that question, I'm trying to get clear about what's at risk: let's work on the assumption that it probably won't work because most of these things don't, so what am I losing? I'm losing time. I'm losing money. I'm losing reputation. All of those things are at risk if I do this.
But how much does that matter to me? It turns out, I can contain the amount of money I lose. In terms of time and reputation, nobody cares that much about my reputation, and my time is my own, so I committed to it. I thought, if it works great, and if it doesn't work, I'm happy to have spent the time building it.
Try to be smart, try and be strategic, try and solve a problem for somebody. Try and create something that's really great. Market it as best you can, and then at a certain point, move on to the next thing.
To what do you attribute the success of The Coaching Habit?
It's a good book. It's a short book. It does something that other coaching books don't, which is “unweird” coaching and make it practical. Because I'd written seven versions before finally deciding to self-publish it—and I'd been teaching the core content for five or six years—I knew it was tried-and-true. It was tested with reality. Then, I spent two years doing not much more than marketing. But above and beyond all of that, I got lucky. It got picked up by the wind and was swept along.
What do you wish everyone knew about coaching?
I wish people knew coaching was an everyday way of showing up and being with each other rather than a formal relationship, or a professional relationship, or a time bound relationship. The behavior that underlies the models in my books is staying curious a little bit longer and giving less advice—call it coaching, or just being present to somebody by seeing and hearing them. I feel like that's the real impact of coaching.
What is your vision for the coaching industry?
Honestly, I think it would be great if there were fewer coaches and more people who were coach-like—better able to be present, curious, and interested in the people around them. I'm not sure that's a great dream for the coaching industry, but I’d like to see a shift in the way humans relate to each other.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.