Episode 198: Coaching At The Edge with guest, Scott Drexler

Chaos is no longer a rare event. It is the default setting for leaders who are trying to deliver results while information, technology, and expectations accelerate around them. I sit down with coach Scott Drexler, author of “Coaching on the Edge: Helping Leaders Perform When Chaos is the operating environment,” to get practical about what actually helps when there is no time, no slack, and no margin for error.

Scott brings a high reliability organizations lens shaped by years as a U.S. Navy SEAL, firefighter, EMT, emergency manager, and now a federal internal coach. We unpack what a sustained COVID-19 response revealed about rotating teams, leadership fatigue, and why “response” is only half the story. The other half is preparedness: training habits in calm moments so they hold when the pressure spikes. We also dig into his research on the inner cue blind spot, the way capable leaders can lose contact with the internal signals that keep judgment sharp and teams safe, especially under data overload.

A standout takeaway is Scott’s idea that the most important leadership coaching can happen in the 10 minutes between events. We talk about how coaches and managers can create micro-pauses, ask focused reflection questions, and “keep the receipt” from hard experiences so learning compounds instead of disappearing. If you coach executives, lead a team, or want a repeatable approach to crisis leadership, you will leave with tools you can use in one-on-ones tomorrow.

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Watch the full interview by clicking here. 

Find the full article here. 

Learn more about Scott here.

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Transcript

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Welcome To Beyond The Page

Garry Schleifer 0:07

Welcome to Beyond the Page, the official podcast of choice, the magazine of professional coaching, where we bring you amazing insights and in-depth features you just won't find anywhere else. Truly! I'm your host, Garry Schleifer, and I'm excited to expand your learning as we dive into the latest article, have a chat with this brilliant author beside me, and uncover the learnings that are transforming the coaching world. When you have a chance, join our vibrant community of coaching professionals as we explore groundbreaking ideas, share expert tips and techniques, and do what we coaches love to do, make a real difference in our clients' lives.

Meet Scott And The Chaos Theme

Garry Schleifer 0:44

In today's episode, I'm speaking with coach Scott Drexler, who's the author of an article in our latest issue, Coaching in Chaos. His article is entitled Coaching on the Edge: Helping Leaders Perform When Chaos is the operating environment. A little bit about Scott. He holds a PhD, he's an ACC with the ICF. He is a Pracademic who has spent, I love that one, Scott, thank you, who has spent his life leading and coaching in high reliability organizations, the arenas that cannot afford a learning curve. And appropriately, he's led teams and developed leaders as a U.S. Navy SEAL, firefighter, EMT, and emergency manager, and currently serves as a Federal Internal Coach. That work has carried him through the National Scale Federal Emergency responses from sustained multi-year activations to no-notice mobilizations, where he coached leaders operating where failure wasn't an option, as most coaches only read about in case studies. So we have him live here today. His doctoral research into how high-stakes leaders read the internal and external cues that decide outcomes in dangerous situations led him to discover the internal cue blind spot. The tendency for capable, confident leaders to lose contact with the very signals meant to keep them and their teams safe. That discovery became a driving force behind the coach model that he talks about in the article, the culmination of his life's work leading in HROs, and he's the founder of the , wow, that's a tongue twister. Spearpoint Performance Institute. Thank you for joining us today, Scott. And thanks for writing for choice.

Scott Drexler 2:32

Yeah, thanks, Garry. It's my pleasure.

Garry Schleifer 2:34

And what inspired you to write for this one? Like great, great that you did. We really appreciate it. Great information, but what what inspired you?

Scott Drexler 2:45

Again, the theme is chaos. And again, I've spent my whole life working in those environments where and I don't consider it chaos anymore. I just consider it a normal day in the office. And then so I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for me to share again what you mentioned earlier is the culmination of my life's work. So I appreciate it.

Garry Schleifer 3:08

Yeah. And

COVID Response And Rotating Teams

Garry Schleifer 3:10

in your article, you write about a few stories related to your work, and particularly you start off with unforgettable COVID-19 experience and how everything changed. Give us an example of like the most crazy thing that happened to you during that time?

Scott Drexler 3:30

Uh oh, that's a good one. A lot because it was a sustained response for us for the role I was in for almost five years, again, because it was the on the what we were doing and providing countermeasures and medical material to folks from Guam to the Virgin Islands, Alaska to Hawaii. We were covering the whole spectrum. But the key point was that as I list in the article, we started, you know, first month was pretty good. It was a lot of chaos, but we had what we would consider to be the A-team. And then within 30 days, higher headquarters, as everybody experienced it, it expanded and it became global and nationwide. And so a lot of the senior leaders that I had developed and were operating in the response with me got pulled to higher headquarters in DC. And so I was pulling in the B team. And 20 days later, the B team got pulled away to do other activities because it kept expanding. So within the first probably 60 days, I had the C team and we were responding 24-7. And that wasn't a bad thing, because it gave me the opportunity to do a lot of coaching.

Garry Schleifer 4:46

Wow, no kidding, no kidding. And you know, I can't help but think that that A team was not like, I mean, they're ready, but nobody was ready for that. No, like so. There was an A team, but the A-team had to hit the ground running and switch left, right the whole bit, right?

Preparedness Over Response Heroics

Scott Drexler 5:05

Yes, and the nice thing about, and this is when I talk about the coach model, is that most people don't again. My background in emergency the all the chaos in the high reliability organizations is it's everybody talks about the response size, but it's the key component is preparedness, right? So the coach model was put together, and you have to apply it in let's say the calm, so that when the chaos hits, it's not a new learning curve. It's something that you're so it was part of how we prepared, it was part of how we trained. So I refined it in the calm. So when the chaos hit, it just rolled right in and it became very effective.

Garry Schleifer 5:45

Right. Okay. That being said, though, you also wrote and about we aren't just writing out disruption, it's normal now. So where do you fit in the preparedness?

Scott Drexler 6:02

So you have to look at it as a cycle because it's a great everybody is if you remember for years, and again, even when I was coming up in business school, and and the the idea was to prepare people to handle the crisis and then fall back to the calm and get to the steady state. Well, steady state doesn't really exist anymore.

Garry Schleifer 6:27

Yeah.

Scott Drexler 6:28

And with the acceleration of technology, the new things coming across markets, that you know, all the global incidents that occur on a regular daily basis, you're constantly in the cycle of preparedness, practicing, utilizing it, and capturing those lessons from the experiences. And then recycling them back. I mean, if you think about it, experience, everybody says experience is the best teacher. And it is the best teacher if you capture the lessons learned. And a lot of times we're going so fast, or everybody's firefighting, and you're fighting one fire to the next fire, and nobody really pauses to capture the lessons learned. The way I like to explain it is you pay the price, but you don't keep the receipt. And it's the receipts when you come back to the balance sheet later, you're able to go, oh, I remember that one. I remember how to do it. So that's really the crux of the coach model is that it's finding those few minutes, those pauses between events where you can actually coach and capture and help the leader encapsulate everything that just happened and put it in their hip pocket, or as I like to say, add it to their Batman utility belt and get ready to move, right? And get ready to move on to the next event.

Lessons Learned And Keeping Receipts

Garry Schleifer 7:45

I'm gonna have to use that one. I usually only say a tool in your toolbox, but I like the Batman approach. That's a little more fun. A little more fun. Well, and thank you. In your article, you have coaching reflection questions and stated four questions to use when the window is short. And the window is very short. How can you get people to pause for some time for reflection?

Scott Drexler 8:11

Again, it's those times you kind of have to, as a coach, you have to set the stage and find the time. It's that Kate, give me a second. Come here, let's talk a second, let's kind of run that through again. So it's very different where your client is scheduling and they're looking for an opportunity, and when they're ready to be coached, they walk in and with what they want you to help them coach with. It's more of a proactive coaching approach, is that you see an opportunity that might be squandered, and then you're like, hey, give me a second, let's talk about this, right? And then you're in the coaching mindset all the time, again, because it's that opportunity, you don't want to squander that opportunity. And like I said, the leaders are in the experience and you're watching it unfold, and you're like, man, if they could just capture that, that would be golden. And so that's kind of how I operate in it is that when you as the coach are looking for the opportunities, you're not waiting for the client to come to you.

Garry Schleifer 9:18

Yeah, wow, thank you. Thank you. Well said, um, and I can't help but wonder, because your background is like come on, SEAL teams, firefighting, emergency, large-scale response. How does that background matter for coaching,

Stealing Minutes For Fast Reflection

Garry Schleifer 9:34

corporate, and executive leaders?

Scott Drexler 9:37

So again, it's the principles that that make those arenas, the people in those arenas, so effective. I mean, the the people that operate in those arenas, again, as I refer to high reliability organizations, which they're categorized under. And, you know, those are the arenas where there's really an as we mentioned early, not a learning curve. I, as a firefighter, can't go out and start a brush fire on purpose, right? I can't.

Garry Schleifer 10:04

That's a I think they call that a career limiting move, Scott. Yes.

Scott Drexler 10:09

Yes. I don't want to create a trauma and overloan an emergency department somewhere just to get practice. But if you think about that from the corporate and executive side, it's the same principle, is that the no matter what arena you're in, the failure modes are very similar. Is that when the individual real their database, their skill set gets overwhelmed, again, they lock up. And in their context, their mindset, that they're failing. And they're not failing, they're just doing what normal people do when their mind gets overwhelmed with information and data. So most businesses, organizations don't face those types of arenas on a regular basis, but I can take that context and lay it over so when they do face some type of similar crisis, they've already got the systems in place and the people are prepared, and their Batman utility belt is full of the proper tools so they can apply them in a more effective manner.

Garry Schleifer 11:11

Yeah. Well, I guess it's a very true statement. It's like you say, you can't start the brush fire, you can only deal with the fire you have and learn from it, reflect and prepare for the next time. The problem is it just keeps going next time, next time, next time, next time, right?

High Reliability Lessons For Executives

Garry Schleifer 11:27

So then, okay, now explain to me this 10-minute theory of yours.

The Ten Minutes Between Events

Scott Drexler 11:37

As far as the grasping, taking taking them away and pulling them aside ? 

Garry Schleifer 11:42

Yeah, you said you say that the most important coaching happens in the 10 minutes between events.

Scott Drexler 11:48

Correct. And it's the encapsulating, it's capturing the experience. Like I said, you just described it, you never you can't start the fires and you're always looking forward to the next one, right? And if you think about how we manage on a day-to-day basis, we're always focused on moving to the next one. Great, I put that out, that's awesome. I moved. And I go back to if you take the 10 minutes and you walk through with the client or you know, the coachee and ask them, what did you just experience? How would you look at it? But more importantly, what did you read in the room and what did you read internally? Because when you start shifting it away from in that 10 minutes, shifting away from the crisis and the fire to the leader, and take that 10 minutes to get the leader to focus back on themselves, all of those coaching things that really make coaching impactful come into play. But you have to find that 10 minutes to pull them out and have them stop looking at the room and reading the room and go back and read what was going on inside them.

Garry Schleifer 12:57

Oh, thank you. You know, it reminds me of the other things I'm learning during this chaos issue about turning to self and grounding, reflecting, very common elements in all the conversations and all the writings that I've been having. So thank you for that. And also thank you for the practical tips in the article. So for those of you that are watching or listening, Scott's put a section there, practical tips for coaches, five ways to apply the coach model with high-stakes clients. Scott, we call this segment, this podcast, Beyond the Page. It's an opportunity for you to tell us about things that you might not have been able to fit into the article or might have changed since sometime you submitted it a hundred years ago because we have a really long lead time. Anything that that would add to this conversation for the readers.

Scott Drexler 13:56

So again, it's I think yes.

Garry Schleifer 14:01

Okay, thanks. Thanks for coming, Scott.

Scott Drexler 14:03

Thanks for coming.

AI Acceleration And Inner Cue Blind Spot

Scott Drexler 14:05

So, but because we're living it, right? With the advent of AI, and everybody is about to start living in a world, if you're not already living in it now, where chaos is going to be the norm because of just the acceleration of everything. And again, and you have at your fingertip and at your disposal this flood of information. And if you don't, as we as coaches don't take the 10 minutes to just it doesn't have to be a fire, it doesn't have to be a COVID response, it's just a normal day in the office. Your people are being overwhelmed by the constant flood of information, and so if you don't pull them aside for 10 minutes and just take that time and encapsulate them and grab them, you know, how are you handling this? What's going on with you? And again, it's the backbone of my research is that inner cue blind spot is that you just start focusing externally and on the information and you're not really capturing the knowledge. So that's the key to you know, again, we're all gonna be again, as you said earlier, there is no back to the calm. The steady state's never gonna be steady state anymore. We're all gonna be moving forward at 900 miles an hour, and we have to figure out how to coach in that environment.

Garry Schleifer 15:25

Yeah. Wow. Well, you seem to have figured that out, and thank you for all the tips in the article as well. And the examples. Awesome. What would you like our audience to do as a result of the article in this conversation?

Use The Model In One On Ones

Scott Drexler 15:41

So, again, as you highlighted, there's the framework there for the coach model, and I've spent a lot of time trying to make it as simple as possible because as we discussed earlier, is that the idea is to encapsulate it and utilize it in the calm before the chaos.

Garry Schleifer 15:59

Right.

Scott Drexler 16:00

And it's a perfect the the way I explained it to people who want to do it in what we again, I hate the term, but I have to use it steady state. It's a perfect tool for using in your one-on-ones with your staff because again, most of the time, and now you with again the technology is keeping track of a lot of projects, a lot of programs, and all the things the the idea of coming in and doing a you know project update and all the different information, that's a perfect opportunity in those one-on-ones to take that 10 minutes and go, hey, let's walk through coach model and we coactively work together to figure out on a behavior that might be beneficial to you come down the road. Again, how are you how would you do that? Explain that to me. Then go do it. And your next one-on-one, you come back and you say, What did you learn from that? What did you capture from that? And then if if this got crazier, how would you use that behavior? So the model works perfectly in calm. And in fact, I encourage everybody to play with it, play with it, I love it, but anyway, is just is to utilize it in the calm so that when the case occurs, it's already ingrained. You don't have to relearn it, it's there.

Garry Schleifer 17:16

Right. Great advice. Thank you very much. And again, thank you for writing for choice Magazine. What's the best way for people to reach you if they want to know more or engage with you on this or other topics?

Scott Drexler 17:28

Again, my LinkedIn page is probably the easiest way and the easiest way to get hold of me. And so that is Scott G. Drexler is the best way to find me.

Garry Schleifer 17:37

There we go.

Scott Drexler 17:38

There's another Scott Drexler, he is a photographer in Hawaii. I'm jealous, but that's not me.

Garry Schleifer 17:46

Well, one could hope that maybe he gave you that photograph of your front view of your house. Yeah. From the front porch. Again, thank you so much, Scott, for joining us for this Beyond the

How To Reach Scott And Wrap

Garry Schleifer 17:58

Page episode. Very informative. Thank you.

Scott Drexler 18:01

Appreciate it, Garry. Thank you very much.

Garry Schleifer 18:03

That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. For more episodes, subscribe via your favorite podcast app. If you're not a subscriber to choice Magazine and you're watching this video, you can sign up for your free digital issue by scanning the QR code in the top right hand corner of my screen. If you are driving and listening to this or on a treadmill, please pull over stop and then go to choice- online.com and click the sign up now button. I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery.