At Slack, I was the founder and co-lead of Fuego, Slack’s Latinx Employee Resource Group.
A benefit of being an ERG lead was getting access to BetterUp coaching sessions which would usually cost hundreds of dollars.
I ended up taking 5+ sessions with a leadership coach and a nutritionist.
I learned a lot from all my sessions and was very grateful that Slack offered this to me.
Overall, I would recommend BetterUp to others.
However, there is some feedback I’d offer to BetterUp:
- make it easier to find a coach who is a woman of color
- it took a lot of emails/time to make this happen for myself and it shouldn’t have
- all the coaches I was initially offered were almost entirely white men
- automatically schedule the coaching sessions with intentional agendas
- even if you have a very busy schedule, you will have set time blocks where you have a free space, but these usually get filled up in advance as well
- so to mitigate this, once you have a time setup, BetterUp could automatically schedule those and setup an agenda for each as well so there’s a sort of learning journey
- there was already a lot of rich content and links to resources on BetterUp but I felt some structure was missing
- lastly, having more of a community aspect would have been a +
- it would have been nice to have had the ability to network or have visibility on other folks who were on a similar journey (minority woman, ERG leader, aspiring software engineering leader, etc)
- I don’t know how this would look like in practice but the experience was very much centered on 1:1 convos with your coach
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Last updated on September 11th, 2022