My career includes benefitting from, learning from, and enjoying the successes of a family business over a nearly 40 year career.
Serving for 17 years as the leader of a team of over 500 talented individuals, I led a strong executive team that was committed to aligning our organization around top priorities and executing strategies that achieved results. We earned the reputation of being an industry leader, maintained solid client relationships through difficult economic times and cultivated an organization-wide allegiance to our company's core values.
I was fortunate enough to have had opportunities to serve on community, economic development, educational and private for-profit boards. As I transitioned from engineer to leadership I learned the importance of not just managing processes but also leading people. Both are necessary for an organization to overcome the barriers to growth.
As a former CEO, I used the process that I now teach to leaders who want to grow their businesses. I know firsthand the value of having a coach. It is not easy to both lead and facilitate a planning session and be a critical observer. Having a partner to help my team be accountable, measure progress, and adjust our plan was invaluable.
We planned well. Like most organizations we knew what we needed to do. However, we often failed to fully execute on our plans. We were good at doing what we always did well and getting the results we always got. We needed to do more.
Creating a culture willing to change: We realized that our organization could benefit from new planning and execution tools; fortunately our team was willing to embrace them, own them, endorse them, and bring in experienced consultants to help us. A good coach isn't going to tell you what to do; your team knows the "what." A coach can help you surface the brutal facts, choose the right priorities, select the proper metrics and teach you a process that will allow for successful execution.
CEOs and Executive Teams get stuck at times and need to introduce new ideas and approaches to energize their organization and promote growth. I was there and I know the value of applying a proven approach to plan execution and team alignment.
All companies plateau. Getting off the plateau takes energy, and for my team that came in the form of introducing a new, more disciplined process designed to help us execute our growth strategies. We did something different to help our team manage change, manage growth, and implement new processes that would allow us to grow in an orderly or organized way.