The Angel with Michael Conniff

Michael Conniff (00:00)
Hello again, everyone, and welcome back to the angel with Michael Conniff. That's me. We're a podcast devoted to, I guess, the money side of things, venture capitalists, angels, people in finance, private equity, you name it, hedge funds. We can squeeze a few of them in here. And I want to remind everybody before we get started that we are available on Substack, make sure to subscribe to our Substack newsletter.

for both the Accelerator, our companion podcast, and the Angel, this podcast. We're also available on Spotify, on YouTube, in full video and audio. And then you can find us on every major Audible type platform, Audible, Amazon, Apple, and all kinds of platforms, not beginning with the letter A. Today we are delighted, I am particularly delighted today to be joined by Alina Doran.

She's an executive coach and advisor and a close friend of mine. And welcome, Alina, great to have you.

Alina Doran (00:58)
Thank you for having me. Great to be here with you.

Michael Conniff (01:01)
She is so much more than just a coach and an advisor. We met completely serendipitously in a New York City coffee shop. And I guess you were sort of trying to hide. You didn't look corporate at all that day. You didn't look spiffy like you do today. But basically at the time, maybe this is a good place to start. You were director of

global streaming, I believe, at the Walt Disney Company, but thinking about leaving there because you wanted to pursue the lifelong dream of being a coach. So how did this become your lifelong dream and how did you achieve it?

Alina Doran (01:38)
Ah, I remember that day very well. And I had the like no meetings today look going exactly. Do you remember it? I, and that's right. That cafe by Gramercy Park. Thank coffee. That's right. I'm 22nd and 3rd. You know, I, that's right. I was a global director of business operations. That's right. At the time. And

Michael Conniff (01:44)
Yeah, you did. That didn't stop me though.

Think coffee, think coffee. That's what it's.

Alina Doran (02:04)
I was already sort of in progress, right, with coaching when we met. It's something that I'd been doing concurrently on weekends, you know, before work, after work, lunch hour, sort of working on the certifications. And that's when I was finishing up all of the certification work with International Coaching Federation and Coactive Coaching as well. And what's funny is it's something that I had pushed away for years that others told me.

hinted for years that I should be doing. And it seemed too risky, too unknown. And I had never, ironically, I'd never had the desire to be an entrepreneur, a solopreneur, much less. Never in my life did I desire to do that. But, this,

Michael Conniff (02:33)
Why don't you push it away?

Mmm.

Were you looking more for security, more for the security of a corporate position? And you have kids that you take care of, you're a single mom, and so you had to worry about that sort of as a primary force.

Alina Doran (02:57)
That's right.

That's right. This was sort of the years in corporate life, right? Spanning Silicon Alley startups all the way through enterprise was a safe environment to play. That felt safe enough to play an experiment with my career. And I perceived this work, it really came to me organically along the way through work that on resume,

like in front of the curtain, had nothing to do with coaching seemingly. And yet behind the scenes, it was in the world of corporate finance. So I started out as a CPA in public accounting. Then I did internal audit. Then I did financial planning analysis. Then I was in the world of controllership and business development. And then most recently business operations, which is when we met. And so-

Michael Conniff (03:30)
Like what?

Mm-hmm.

Alina Doran (03:52)
My career was evolving. I had been pivoting, making intentional pivots to more closely align who I am and why I'm here in this life with what I do for a living. And every single pivot brought me closer and closer. And what was also happening all along the way, and this is how, like, this is Rome and all the roads have been leading here, is all along the way, I would be counted on and trusted to do, to solve the types of challenges that were not officially in the job description.

you know, like negotiations between business leads, negotiation of policy, conflict resolution, you know, being a ghostwriter and being a communications advisor, how do you trickle down when you have a difficult message to deliver, how do we do it? What is the trickle? What sequence do we do it in? Who do we talk to and how? How do we modulate that communication? Folks will come to me for advice, for me to help.

work with them. At some point, a former boss was explicitly hiring me to coach them behind the scenes, then coach teams behind the scenes. And then that's how I got into the game.

Michael Conniff (04:57)
And what kind was that? Disney or where was that?

Alina Doran (05:01)
That is, that's confidential. I will keep, I will respect the privacy, but what I will share is at Disney.

Michael Conniff (05:06)
What kind of company, I guess, what kind of company would be the question?

Alina Doran (05:09)
A software as a service, mature, like both series, like series D type of a mature startup. And you know, it's while so by the time that I got to Disney, which is where right where I was when we met, I had joined to work on the launch and strategy execution of the Disney plus streaming product global launch. And so I was particularly working on the EMEA.

Michael Conniff (05:12)
Okay.

Alina Doran (05:35)
launch for all of those countries and then for the entire continent of Latin America. It was an incredibly exciting, unbelievable experience, incredible teams. It was very successful. I was surrounded by talented, passionate, invested people who wanted, you know, who were really using their imagination and abilities and everything they had that they gave. And so I was in good company.

Michael Conniff (05:36)
Mm-hmm.

How much credit can you take for that launch? Because it was pretty successful.

No.

Alina Doran (06:05)
Um, it was amazing. And then what I will say is I had a vision for, by the time I got to Disney and I'll say the biggest reason I came to work there and it's incredible company was to be able to brag to my children, to impress,

Michael Conniff (06:20)
That's a very good reason. You hear actors taking jobs as voice actors or actresses in animation for that reason. My kid can't watch any of my movies. They're too mature. So you were starting to coach externally, but were you also starting to do some of this internally at Disney?

Alina Doran (06:32)
Right. That's right.

Mm-hmm. That's right. So I was fortunate enough, just so grateful for the opportunity to participate as a facilitator, which was pretty remarkable that the leadership, I'm just so grateful. I was an outlier, very much an outlier in that I was in the COO world, let's say, right, in the business operations world, and not officially part at all of the leadership development

as a facilitator for teams of executives at Disney, for global executives in various divisions of the company in a program, a leadership development program. And so that was an incredible opportunity. It was yet another affirmation that this work is soul aligned.

Michael Conniff (07:27)
What kind of coaching do people at Disney need?

Alina Doran (07:29)
Oh, I mean, they're humans. So it's, you know, if we don't, you know,

Michael Conniff (07:34)
Yeah, but I mean, is it strategic? Is it how to, is it like how to, how to marry a personal with professional? Is it, is it, how do I get along with my boss? You know, kind of what are the baskets it fits into?

Alina Doran (07:42)
Well, through a-

Sure. So I mean, to speak more broadly, when we talk about matrixed organizations in general, folks are looking at influence. That's typically a key item that we work on. And turning moments of visibility into career level ups. So you have this opportunity, you're meeting with teams. This is your chance to shine. It's your chance to advocate. It's your chance to get buy-in, respect, trust. How do you do that?

You know, also one of the other, one of the beautiful aspects of matrixed large enterprises is the opportunity to work across different teams and have new positions.

Michael Conniff (08:26)
I've been looking for the beauties of large matrixed organizations my whole life. So I'm looking forward to this answer. How to work with cross-functional teams.

Alina Doran (08:32)
You're a little...

They absolutely exist 100%. And it's a beautiful thing. I mean, companies are groups of people, just collections of people. And so working with teams who don't have a way of appreciating and knowing what you do for a living and why it matters and how are they invested, how is it all related? How are we all working toward the same goal? How do we acknowledge each other? How do we make sure that all of our needs, that we all feel seen and understood, and then can...

coalesce around a common goal, a common target. How do we do that?

Michael Conniff (09:09)
How do you coach that internally?

Alina Doran (09:12)
I will say, how do you coach that?

Michael Conniff (09:13)
In a big, I mean, this applies to a small company, a startup, this applies to a bigger company, it applies across the board. So how do you coach that up? You know, did you know where coaching something up comes from? That was Steve Spurrier of the University of Florida. They would ask him, you know, how's he going to get his team to do what he wants? He says, I got to coach him up. I got to coach him up. So how do you coach him up?

Alina Doran (09:16)
or? Uh huh.

So it really.

Gotta coach them up. I mean, the answer is going to be, the first answers might be slightly less satisfying and it depends on the context. And so it really truly does depend on the context of what the goal is of the person that I'm working with. And this is internal or external, right? For some time there was some internal coaching, but really we're solving problems depending on what the desired outcome is. And so if that person's coming into a team dynamic and

Michael Conniff (09:42)
Uh-huh.

Okay.

Alina Doran (10:03)
They want to build trust. Well, how do you build trust? What's the starting point? And when we build trust, we are in turn building influence. We're building social capital. A person can know, a team can know, this is a helpful person. We wanna work with them. They make our lives easier. They hear our problems and they do something about them. Or we team up well. When we work together, like, so...

A lot of the times the starting point is, what is the desired goal? What do you want? And sometimes a more pointed question is, when you leave this meeting, or when this project is over, what is everyone saying about working with you? What are they thinking? And so that intentionality, this is how I want to serve on this team. This is the role I want to play. I want them to know that they can trust me. I want them to know that they can...

Michael Conniff (10:34)
Yo.

Alina Doran (10:55)
come to me with problems and we will get to a productive place. I want them to know that they do not need to be perfect. I want them to feel safe, safe to share bad news with me, right? To share, to be the leader. I want to be the leader who folks will share unflattering things with way before they need to share them because they respect you.

Michael Conniff (11:19)
Yeah. Now, how does it change or shift? I know that now you're doing coaching and advising that can, I guess you could call it more personal in the sense that maybe you're working with an individual as opposed to a team. And how does the paradigm shift as a coach when you've got just one person in front of you? And maybe they're there.

Alina Doran (11:35)
Mmm.

Michael Conniff (11:40)
both for personal and professional. Maybe it starts to bleed into each other. Where do you start there? Where's the starting point?

Alina Doran (11:47)
Mm. I'll say and you know, and I do, to your point, work with one on one as well as group and team. And

The starting point, the blend of personal and professional, the starting point, the headline is professional. Inevitably, the entire person is walking into the room. And so, and you know.

Michael Conniff (12:07)
Yes, it's very hard to separate the body from the soul. Yes, correct.

Alina Doran (12:10)
That's right. And it is the same person walking into, you know, that's right, walking back into their home or walking into their office. And a metaphor that I tend to use is one of an octopus. So when the person comes in and we start working together, they express their initial challenges that they want to work on, right? They'll say, well, I don't get respect that I deserve. I've been overlooked for a promotion.

or I have a really difficult boss, it's stressing me out, it's a blocker, I don't know what to do with that, or I am getting, like I'm about to burn out to a crisp, this isn't sustainable, or my significant other tells me that I'm about to burn out and I can't continue like this. So they come up with, you know, these are the challenges, this is what we're starting with. When we start to survey the landscape and understand the whole picture,

of what's going on. Inevitably what we discover is that the problems that they come with are basically, they're at the tip of one of the tentacles of the octopus. Right, and as we survey the whole animal, we realize like, oh, that's just the end of it. That's the tip of it. The tentacle is actually quite long all the way back there. And look, there's seven more. And over there is the head. That's the whole animal. And so by the time we've processed and surveyed the animal in the landscape,

and understand how things relate and start digesting, start processing those initial points that they come with, those challenges become almost moot points, right? Please.

Michael Conniff (13:40)
And we should point out octopi are a sensate creature. So it's a great analogy. And many believe that we should not be eating them, for example, because they're, they have, then there's a great documentary about an octopus and a man, which I recommend, I think, on HBO, but you use it as an analogy. So people have these various tentacles in life, eight or more, eight or less, but a bunch of them, right?

Alina Doran (13:45)
Yes.

room

Michael Conniff (14:08)
So how do you, you know, how do you get them working together?

Alina Doran (14:08)
Yes.

Hmm, that's a great question. You know, what we, inevitably what we start to really understand is what do you want? Which is the simplest question on Surface. What do you really want? It is the most complex, and it sounds so simple. What do you truly want? And we, you know, through a number, through, you know, it's whatever is called for in the toolkit, we get there in very different ways from person to person, depending on what they need. But...

Michael Conniff (14:24)
It's actually the most complicated question as well. Yeah.

Alina Doran (14:41)
What is really driving you? What are your values? What do you truly believe in? Not what you think you should be answering, not what others have wanted you to say, not what you'd like to hear yourself say. So sort of removing the shields and the masks and whoever you need to be out there here. And that's a critical part in creating, a trusting safe container that we can do anything in.

and suspend judgment and play in, is to really explore when you put the mask and the costume and the shield, when you leave those at the door and you're really here as you, what are you seeing? What are you noticing? What's the difference between out there and in here? And that is inevitably one of the paths that it's a key path to get to, what do you really want?

Michael Conniff (15:09)
Mm-hmm.

Alina Doran (15:34)
What's driving this? What's this really about?

Michael Conniff (15:35)
Yeah, just to corporate and personal enlightenment, I do want to ask you, you gave a rather, what's becoming rather a famous speech at a conference. And I'm going to let you tell us the title of the speech, and then tell us why it resonated and continues to resonate to this day.

Alina Doran (15:54)
Um, so the talk, um, don't be shy. Okay. The talk is called how not to be an asshole. And it is aligned with my, my mission in this work. Part of that mission is what I term de-asshole-ization.

Michael Conniff (15:55)
Don't be, don't be shy, Elena. You can, you can say it. You can say the word.

Alina Doran (16:12)
of a corporate world, individuals and getting more honest, more real, kinder, kinder to self, kinder to others, be getting real, tangible, measurable business results.

Michael Conniff (16:14)
Yeah.

Okay, so connect the DS-holization with the business results. Why does that produce a better business result? Because to just push back in a way in which is not consistent with what I believe, but a lot of people, a lot of executives, a lot of very successful people, you can look at Walter Isaacson's book on Elon Musk, if you want an example. And there are many others of somebody who acts really badly.

Alina Doran (16:24)
and

Ugh.

Mm-hmm.

Yes, that's right. Yes.

Michael Conniff (16:51)
and treats people like dirt and sometimes apologizes, usually doesn't. And have managed to be successful. Donald Trump, we're not going to do politics here, but when Donald Trump has one of the worst days of his life, on the same day he makes $5 billion in an initial public offering. He just seems to succeed despite everything. And despite being pretty nasty.

So why is being a little nicer and kinder? Are we sure that translates into business results?

Alina Doran (17:17)
Uh-huh.

Yes, now, and it's interesting that you talk about, and yes, politics aside, candidates aside, over 20% of all CEOs display psychopathic tendencies. Over 20%, psychopathic tendencies. So, in the how not to be an asshole talk, and the talk is where I introduce my framework. The framework is around defining what,

Michael Conniff (17:38)
20%.

Alina Doran (17:52)
those behaviors are, which is really a combination of being unaware of the behaviors that are hurtful and not helpful. And...

Michael Conniff (17:59)
such as what would be the typical asshole behaviors referring to?

Alina Doran (18:02)
So I'll give you, in the framework, and I think to answer your earlier question of why does it resonate? It resonates because it's built on 25 years of corporate battle scars, wounds, and proven methods, and use cases, and real life examples one after another of the costs, the costs of being an asshole.

And so what are those business results? Well, the behavior that is unhelpful, that folks are unaware of, and that's how I define assholes in the talk is, behaviors that are not helpful, that the people are unaware of. So we aren't speaking of the psychopathic type of, or the I want to see you hurt, I wanna see you suffer type of behaviors. The costs are tremendous, right? You have on the personal level,

You have your personal health, your mental health, your physical health, people physically get ill. That actually becomes really expensive for companies.

Michael Conniff (18:59)
Yeah, that's very true. And they make other people feel ill.

Alina Doran (19:03)
They make other people feel really ill, right? Your reputation, your sense of belonging, your self view. When we look at an organizational, a company side, it's really expensive to hire people, to find the right candidates. It's important, it's so difficult. When those people leave, it costs multiples of those initial costs to hire them, to replace them. And then on top of the financial cost,

Michael Conniff (19:29)
Because they've done damage.

Alina Doran (19:31)
Well, it's really expensive to replace candidates, right? It's financially, it's painful, it takes time. And then, aside from directly, we can directly trace immediate costs that are financial, you have morale, you have quality of work that declines, you have the toxicity that had spread through the team. It just, you know, it takes a couple bad apples, right? Could be the tone at the top, could be that leader that impacts the whole team and the hardworking

you know, tall, high quality, promising talent leaves and the team is shaken, right? So their engagement decreases, their effectiveness in turn decreases, their, the goal attainment, whatever goals, whatever key performance metrics that were defined, those don't get met, your revenue goals, innovation. So great ideas are stifled.

Michael Conniff (20:24)
Yeah, that's a good, that's a big one.

Alina Doran (20:26)
And so, and there's a whole trickle effect of competitiveness of the company that's affected by culture, by the tone at the top, by leadership, by how teams engage, by how they silo or how they work together, how they trust, or they hold back if they have, you know, lane grabbing and territory grabbing, or listen, ego at the door, we all want, we want to get this done and I'm going to help you. And I'm going to share information with you. I want you to succeed. And.

Michael Conniff (20:30)
Mm-hmm.

Alina Doran (20:54)
I'm going to and I know that you want me to succeed.

Michael Conniff (20:56)
And it seems you struck a chord with this.

Alina Doran (20:58)
I did. I mean, there's, you know, and I've, you know, the talk is where I introduced the framework. It's effective. It works. It's got five animals and each of the animal archetypes has a set of symptoms. And the really important thing to understand about those five animals is that they adapted behaviors in order to preserve themselves for their own safety. It wasn't, we're not looking to

kill off any animals. We're not going hunting.

Michael Conniff (21:25)
or Octopi while we're at it.

Alina Doran (21:27)
We're looking to feed the animals and be nice to them. So, and I'll go ahead. Be kind, that's right. They're here for a reason. It's about, you know, safety. They display certain behaviors because they've learned over time that this is how they need to act to get things done, to be safe.

Michael Conniff (21:31)
Be kind to animals. Be kind to animals. Be kind to animals.

Yeah.

Now I'm going to segue into a slightly different place. We have only a few minutes left, but I'm dying to talk to you on the record about your experience at the New York Times where you were in, did a lot of financial work, but it wasn't, you weren't there recently. You were there when the New York Times was really trying to figure out the paywall, subscriptions, newsletters. How are we going to find a financial model?

Alina Doran (21:57)
Oh.

Yes. That's right. Yes.

Michael Conniff (22:12)
that's going to replace the print newspaper. And they've actually done that quite well, quite successfully, with a big push from Donald Trump, actually, in helping push up subscriptions. But when you were at the New York Times, so it was very stressful. It was not clear that the New York Times had a future, was it?

Alina Doran (22:29)
It was a difficult time for the print industry. Absolutely. And we were working on the first paywall that did not succeed, took it down. And then the one that's up now is the one that's going. Again, a lot of, yes, the one that's been successful.

Michael Conniff (22:45)
The one that's been successful, yeah. And you were there when Martin Nissenholtz was there, right, as the head of the digital side. I just have to very briefly, Martin Nissenholtz and I were two of a very small group of people at the very beginning of the online industry in 1980. And the reason I bring him up, he was a professor at NYU. He was only about 22. I was pretty impressive.

Alina Doran (22:51)
That's right.

Michael Conniff (23:09)
he, back then, he was the only person I knew in new media who was actually younger than me. So he, and then he went on to Ogilvy and Mather and ran, ran digital there and then eventually the New York Times. But, and, and I think really had a lot to do with solving the riddle. And then the other guy was Jim Thompson. He was after you, right? He came in as the CEO. Okay.

Alina Doran (23:34)
Yes. Yes, that's right.

Michael Conniff (23:36)
So when you were there, they had not figured it out. There's a lot of pressure. There's a lot of intensity. So how did this, was there a lot of assholery at the time, at the, at the, at the old lady?

Alina Doran (23:39)
Not yet.

I would say.

I would say, again, it's mission driven, people who believe with everything that they have a heart and soul in. That's right, the great lady.

Michael Conniff (23:58)
The old gray lady. So, did you feel safe in that environment? Did you feel you could be honest and push back and your bosses had your back? Or was it more difficult than that? I'm not asking you to name names. I'm just curious because this is a formative experience.

Alina Doran (24:00)
civil society.

I, oh, yeah. It was a formative experience. I felt safe. I felt that we could really have candid conversations and share. And I also felt that it was in service of, and this is, I wholeheartedly believe in, and I think that was my brand, it's me, is the truth telling. I'm going to tell you what is in service. It's in...

that will serve you to hear. It may not sound, you may not love hearing it, but you need to hear it. A true friend will tell you that you have spinach between your teeth.

Michael Conniff (24:47)
Well, you know, I think there are two kinds of friends. There's the kind who will and there's the kind who won't. There's the kind who will tell you what you want to hear. Nothing evil about that. But there's the kind, I put myself in this category, who tell you what you don't want to hear. And it's two different approaches to friendship. But just in a couple minutes we have left, what do you see in the future of the Alina Duran?

coaching and advising business.

Alina Doran (25:15)
Hmm. More, more, more of all of it, I mean, it's really expanding one-on-one offerings, the talk that we talked about, introducing, that framework has been incredibly helpful. I've been running group offerings with that framework, playing really with those, and really if people are finding it, it's incredible to watch the impact that it's having on people, how helpful they're finding it in.

Michael Conniff (25:19)
or the above.

Alina Doran (25:42)
pretty short period of time and adapting the language and adapting the perspectives, really allowing them to reflect and laugh about their behaviors. I inject humor and the occasional profanity where it's placed. And it's really been very, very useful. So expanding those offerings and to a more immersive experience, that's what's up next. There's more to come for sure.

Michael Conniff (26:07)
Yeah, last four to come and do you feel like you're achieving your dream?

Alina Doran (26:11)
This is this realm of work and motherhood are the two places where I feel I am meant to be here in this lifetime.

Michael Conniff (26:20)
That's a pretty good start so far for a young woman like yourself. I want to thank Alina Doran for being here. She's an advisor and executive coach. She was at a big job at Disney rolling out streaming in India and Latin America in particular, corporate jobs with startups, with the New York Times, and now a coach and advisor to companies big and small. Thanks so much for being with us, Alina. Really appreciate it.

Alina Doran (26:23)
Thanks for watching!

Thank you so much for having me. It's been wonderful.

Michael Conniff (26:50)
Long overdue, we've been talking about this for a long time. And I wanna thank you out there for listening to The Angel. Make sure to keep an eye out for the Accelerator, our companion podcast, find us on all the major platforms, rate us, like us, and above all, subscribe on Substack. It's great to see you. And as I like to say, we'll be back with another podcast before you know it.

Alina Doran (26:53)
That's right.