Coaching
Partnering with you as a leader to make the right things happen, when everything’s going crazy.
Despite your best efforts as a leader, departments still talk past each other, conflicts are ignored, your people don’t take enough initiative and you’re walking on eggshells around the board.
Much of what you’ve been doing is fine, but I can help you find the few missing links in your approach and behaviors that will deliver the solutions that have been eluding you. Small changes will have a big impact, and will get you to a much better place. I have 25 years of experience with helping people make exactly the right changes that get them to the other side. I can help you too.
Why Leaders Call Me
I started my career in international conflict resolution. My work back then was to help groups in ethnic conflicts find a way out of their destructive patterns and create a more productive future together. Organizations, it turns out, aren’t all that different.
I have helped leaders to:
- Get departments to stop talking past each other and start solving problems jointly.
- Enable their direct reports to do more on their own.
- Manage board relations without walking on egg shells.
- Confront and resolve the conflicts under the surface that have been sapping their bandwidth.
- Manage culture one change at a time.
These challenges—plus your unique ones—share something important in common: they are hard to solve by yourself when you are inside the system.
My Practice
I spent decades preparing to do this work right now.
When I first launched my consulting practice, I asked people close to me to describe the impact I had on them, and one said “I don’t know why, but when you’re there, I feel safe enough to talk about hard things.” Then I spent decades leveraging that gift on the ground, helping leaders have the right conversations and turn them into the meaningful actions. Now I leverage those decades of experience in my coaching with leaders who realize that yesterday’s best practices aren’t cutting it any more.
You have a lot of problems to solve, but not a lot of time.
My whole career has been about helping people take action and solve problems, which has never been more important than it is today. Yes, that involves some reflection and deep thinking. I’ve written four books, so obviously I value deep thinking. But if you can’t quickly convert ideas and concepts into actions and practices, you will struggle as a leader today.
My coaching is specifically designed to help you to:
- Walk into the hard meeting without dread.
- Stop being the only person who sees the problem.
- Trust your own read and take action, instead of second-guessing.
- Fix things permanently, clearing a path for the important work you have yet to do
Why Choose This?
The value I bring as a coach:
In my career, I have rarely analyzed from a distance and made recommendations. I usually worked side-by-side with leaders and staff at all levels to design and implement changes that made their lives and their organizations better. This is what I mean by converting ideas and concepts into tangible actions and practices. That is today’s work, and it’s what I do.
Start with a free session.
Before you commit to anything, you can experience what my coaching is like. The first session is free, and it is a working conversation. We’ll examine a situation you are facing, how it is showing up in your system, and what changes you can make to your thinking and actions that will make a difference. There’s no obligation to continue; it’s your choice.
Examples
Conflict
Helping a department VP prioritize their interests during a conflict with another department leader around decision-making authority. We spent several sessions debriefing the conflict conversations and clarifying approaches and strategies until the two leaders came to an agreement and implemented the change.
Culture
Helping a CEO create some process-based boundaries that enabled their direct reports to start taking more risks and running more experiments (and learning from them) rather than trying to map out multi-year initiatives in more detail or continuously coming back to the CEO for approval. The new processes created space for the team to unlock new value by creating new programs.
Change
Helping a CEO work with members of their senior team individually to understand how their roles are changing in the middle of a business model shift. In this case I did some individual work with members of the senior team in addition to working with the CEO, and the clarity and new behaviors enabled faster adoption of the new business model.
Jamie has been coaching me for several years, and he has a keen eye for connecting dots among all the issues we work through. He pushes me to explore more deeply my own role in both creating and solving the problems I face, and his deep experience inside organizations allows him to help me work through changes involving others on my team.”
Trevor Mitchell, CAE, FASAE, CEO
International Association of Venue Managers
Schedule a Free Consultation
Set up a call and I can go over how the process works and what results you can expect at each step in the process.