VMSA: Conscientious Coaching

Just over a month ago, we launched our counselling program with Venture Mentoring Service of Alberta (VMSA). If you don’t know about VMSA, they’re a mentorship program for scale-up stage founders. Their initiative, which has had some impressive growth over the last few years,  is all about coaching the founder to build leadership capacity. In their words, they help build the race car driver, not the race car.

Through our partnership, all of their mentees now have one-click access to an initial counselling session. This initial session uses a model of counselling called Brief Solution-Focused Therapy, which is goal-driven, future-focused and evidence-based for single sessions. It allows individuals to access pragmatic and timely support with the goal of developing a plan, and so that founders will recognize that they have the skills and resources available to them to help them move forward. Simply put: it’s an approachable way to learn about and access mental health services and resources.

We know we’re biased when it comes to this work—we wouldn’t be here if we weren’t!—so don’t take it from us. Our co-founder, Sarah, chatted with VMSA’s program manager, Chris Doble, about why this program, and supporting founder mental health in general, is a priority for VMSA. 

Sarah: Tell us about your program and what you offer to founders? How are you different from other mentorship programs? 

Chris: So, VMSA, the Venture Mentoring Service of Alberta, is an entrepreneur mentorship program. We use a mentorship model that comes from MIT that's really built around this concept of team mentorship. Ultimately, the program is designed to support scale-up stage founders and help them build leadership capacity to become better leaders for their organization. So, the way we do that is for each entrepreneur that we bring into the program, we match them with a team of three mentors who provide ongoing coaching and guidance and mentorship as they scale their business.

Where I think our mentorship program differs from others is that where a lot of programs really focus on helping entrepreneurs build strong businesses, our focus is almost exclusively on the individual. We tend not to get too deep into the operational and tactical parts of the business. It’s all about how you build the leadership skills and leadership capacity of the entrepreneur with the goal of turning them into a better leader or a more effective leader for their business.

One step further to that, we take a very strong coaching philosophy in mentorship where we're not tactical business advisors. It's not about telling people how they should or shouldn’t run their business. It's not about giving them direct advice or guidance or telling them what to do, and really, in most cases, it's not about providing answers for their problems. We really try to stay in this coaching space where it's all about asking deeper questions and really challenging people to think more critically. We want to help them unpack the challenges that they're facing and see things with perspectives that they're not considering. We ask questions that drive them to come to their own conclusions and solve their own problems.

Sarah: And so I would imagine, then, with that coaching philosophy and encouraging people to have those deep conversations, that founder mental health comes up in your program. I’m curious what you've noticed when it comes to founder mental health within your program and what patterns you’ve seen. 

Chris: Yeah, I would say just at a high level that the stats are out there that entrepreneurs by nature suffer from higher degrees of mental health distress and different challenges, even greater than the general population, so, that's at baseline. We're working with a population that is predisposed to higher stressors and more anxiety—there's a lot of challenge that comes with building a business. That's almost table stakes going into it—working with people that are in stressful situations off the bat. 

I think to be effective in a coaching-style program, it requires a level of vulnerability and openness and a willingness to get into some of the very real challenges that people are facing. Frankly, that's where I think a program like ours can offer a lot of value: in being this sounding board where people can come and have the open and honest discussions that they can't necessarily have elsewhere, like in their social circles or with their investors or their board or with their co-founders. 

Also, good coaching can sometimes go pretty deep and often the role of the mentor is to ask some questions that really drill down into what is the root of what's holding a mentee back or what's stopping a mentee from building the most effective business possible. I think sometimes we see that it can become a bit of a blurred line with how deep a coaching conversation can or should go versus when someone might actually need more professional mental health support, and that's one thing that we're always trying to be mindful of. In most cases, our mentors are volunteers and they're not trained mental health professionals, and so we do have a responsibility to recognize where that scope lies and when a topic or a conversation may be getting out of depth of what might be responsible for us to be dealing with, and when we would look at referring someone to more professional support. 

So, it's just something that we always want to be mindful of. We certainly don't want to pretend to be something we're not, and don't want to put our mentees or our mentors in positions where they're either not equipped to have those conversations or in some cases it might be irresponsible. There is a limit to what we can and should provide as a volunteer mentorship program.

Sarah: Well, that’s a great segway into my next question: why is it important to you as a program manager to incorporate that additional mental health education and intervention support for your founders?

Chris: Yeah, I think in the last few years, we've seen multiple instances where one of our mentees has required support beyond what our mentors are equipped to deal with. There's been a range there, including everything from just wanting to do more research on what's out there in terms of help or support all the way to near-crisis situations. It's been a large spectrum of severity, but nonetheless, we've seen many times now that pattern where sometimes people do require more than what we can provide as a mentorship program. But, these things are often exposed in our mentorship conversations, and so for me personally, from the get-go, I feel a responsibility to take care of our members. That's first and foremost.

Again, I think good mentorship should push people and I think sometimes it should push people pretty hard. This is, of course, a program that people sign up to participate in and they know what we're about as they go into it, but at the same time, I think if we are going to be having these deeper conversations and be pushing people, there is a responsibility on our part to make sure that if they stumble, we're there to catch them if they fall. We’re there to provide some of that support if it turns out that the scope goes beyond what we can be providing as a program. Ultimately, it's just we care about the people that are in our program and we want to make sure that they're supported in whatever comes their way.

Sarah: So in offering single session counseling services to your mentees, what do you hope to achieve?

Chris: Again, we've had these situations come up in the past and we've always had resources available for people and have been happy to share them with them, but it still puts so much of the onus on the individual to go and find out what is the next right step. Where should they be going for support? And one thing we all know for sure is that entrepreneurs are short on time, and so a big part of it for us is just looking at if we have a situation where someone needs additional support, how can we reduce as many barriers as possible? How can we make it as streamlined as possible, so that in the least number of steps, they can get the real support that they need? We look at the anonymity of it. We look at the cost element of it. We look at the volume of resources that are available in the community and how we can strip away as much of that as possible so that within one scheduled conversation they can get steered towards the exact type of support that they need.

That's what we love about this partnership with Collectively Tangled: the idea that if someone needs support, there's a link that they can click and all they need to do is book a session. That initial session can really be a conversation. Collectively Tangled can understand where they're at and has a much better understanding of the support that exists within the community and then can help do a mental health triage, if you will, and really assess and determine where the best path forward might be for the entrepreneur.

Sarah: Okay, and so how will you know that this program that you're offering to your mentees has had a positive impact on your program participants and the people you support?

Chris: That's a good question. I mean, it's one of these funny things where in a perfect world, you hope people don't ever need to use it! But for us, if our mentees are actually using it—and early indications are that it’s a resource that people want, because multiple people had already tapped into within a week of launching—then that’s a win. Also, for our mentors, helping mentees find the right solution when they need additional support will, in theory, be easier, and over time, there will be an even clearer delineation of when someone would keep the conversation going within VMSA versus when they might need to take these conversations to more professionals support. The hope is that in partnering with Collectively Tangled, they can provide a bit of that guidance around where people can get the real mental health support that they need.