Business Challenge

• Brilliant Technical Leader is assigned a global leadership position in a troubled business unit.
• Challenged to lead global sales and inspire a business unit that experienced 5 years of economic fade.
• Senior leadership requests coaching to support this newly promoted leader to develop into his new role.

Break Through Process:

Aspirations: What is most important to you right now?

• Explore how he might reinvent himself as a stronger leader while still remaining authentic to what was important to him personally.
• Evolve executive’s technical communication style to meet standards of his new audience: Board of Directors, Senior Leadership Team and Executive Sales Team.
• Develop leadership skills to create greater collaboration and consensus amongst varied stakeholders.

Awareness: How do others in the organization see you?

• Discovered that others believed his technical brilliance and ability to synthesize information could produce the answer to the economic fade, however his communication style could de-rail his success.
• Realized that he needed to fully understand the perspective of the person(s) being addressed to effectively communicate his vision and inspire execution.
• Recognized that his unique subject matter expertise was highly valued by the company and needed to be leveraged at every opportunity as a means to build consensus.
• Acknowledged that the old leadership behaviors that had taken the sales leader this far had met their limits. Additional leadership behaviors were necessary to take him forward.

Action Plan: What goals inspire and ignite you to action?

• Supported the sales leader in developing both verbal and non-verbal communication skills - listening, questioning and adapting one's style.
• Assisted in creating concise and actionable presentations, monthly newsletter and other communications that distilled his brilliant business models.
• Identified that the sales leader personally valued execution over collaboration and interpersonal relationships. Shifted this focus to the interpersonal allowing him to “do” less, by gaining more support from others.
• Gained understanding of multiple stakeholders' points of view and the ability to integrate this with business facts to move the organization forward.

Assess Results: How has your vision become reality?

• CEO recognized that during the tenure of coaching this sales leader moved his business unit from 5 years of fade, to profitability.
• CEO further recognized that "coaching contributed to the business unit exceeding goal by $30 million in revenue."
• Business Unit President stated that, “Coaching helped improve customer satisfaction, and improvements in customer relationships set the business up for even bigger long-term gains."
• Sr. Vice President of Human Resources stated that, "Coaching supported a marked improvement in the efficiency of the team including increased productivity and improved morale."
• Increased effectiveness in communicating change initiatives led to superior execution of business plan.