Humane Leadership Coaching & Advisory

Coaching and advisory services help leaders navigate crucial moments in their careers.

  • Facing a huge decision?
  • Heading into a life-changing conversation?
  • Rebalancing effectiveness and wellbeing?
Stephen and Nick at Brickroom

We support you based on 30 years of practical experience leading:

  • At the board level – cooperatives, family businesses, nonprofits, schools
  • In the C-Suite – in SMB
  • Business units – to $70 million P&L responsibility
  • Technical, sales, and operations teams

We used this experience to build simple, powerful methods to help you optimize critical decisions and actions. We address your most pressing questions:

How can I…

  • Maintain my personal integrity and wellbeing in the daily blur?
  • Sustain energy and focus while I’m overwhelmed and overstimulated?
  • Earn influence and gravitas?
  • Coach and mentor my team members?
  • Shift from operational management to strategic leadership?
  • Up level my team’s performance, creativity, and intelligent risk taking?
  • Naturally generate new opportunities?
  • Grow professionally and personally at the same time?

Most powerfully, your coaching enables me to step back from my closely-held perspectives and beliefs.

You ask relevant and poignant questions so I can consider (with curiosity and safety) other possibilities.

— Sarah, Manager Learning, Organizational Development and Resilience, Stanford Children’s Hospital

Coaching Services

  • Personal coaching – two 50-minute sessions per month to help you navigate moments of challenge and opportunity while practicing next-level skills to optimize your effectiveness and wellbeing.
  • Partner coaching – unlimited phone, text, and email spot coaching just before critical meetings, conversations, or decisions as an add-on to the personal coaching plan.

Advisory Services

  • Non-executive director – supporting board and staff in the pursuit of the organization’s mission in alignment with their values, opportunities, and constraints. Strong experience with financial, operational, and go to market strategies informed by years of C-level and consulting experience.
  • Board chair advisory – supporting productive collaborations between board members and staff.  Serving as chairman and chief executive in many organizations allows us to support clarity of roles, alignment, and accountability in yours.
  • Facilitation – of board  retreats, strategic planning and decision making that quickly builds an aligned, creative space to bring out the best in your board/staff collaborations.

Approach

Leaders unfold a more effective and humane approach by:

  • Exploring the status quo in circumstances, habits, and mental models.
  • Discovering opportunities for rapid shifts in actions, results, and experience.
  • Designing performance improvement experiments based on 360-degree peer reviews before, during and after our advisory work.
  • Engaging in real projects they help design to stretch their skills and deliver measurable, visible results to the organization.

Benefits

Effective, humane performance improvement practices and tools that drive results over a lifetime:

  • Team performance improvement
  • Engagement, earned influence and authority
  • System and process design
  • Financial leadership
  • Persuasion and strategic messaging
  • Critical thinking, data and analysis

Executive advisory typically consists of two one-hour meetings with your coach per month. These meetings can be virtual or live depending on your location. Engagements to be a minimum of 3 months and up to years of shared opportunities and growth.

Stephen is easily my favorite mentor and business associate.

His ability to help others along the pathway of life and business in a way that expands and nurtures them and those around them, and that also keeps them focused on their true values and priorities, is as far as I can tell, incomparable.

— Steve Rice, Dot Com Jungle

Scroll down to see case studies

Advisory Case Studies

Case 1 – Financial Crisis

Situation:  

Financial and strategic crisis complicated by numerous stakeholders and conflicting values.

Setting: 

Omnichannel retail

Advisory client work:

Weekly advisory meetings on financial analysis and coaching to tee up strategic decisions around market strategy. Advisory on complex decisions to balance personal and stakeholder needs across staff, creditors, investors and the community. Financial and communications advisory around minimizing relationship impacts and maximizing enterprise value at cessation of operations.

Outcomes:

Partners, investors and staff amicably aligned on a path forward. All creditors paid as agreed.

Case 2 – Leader Frustration

Situation:  

Leader frustration with team underperformance

Setting: 

Software design and development

Advisory client work:

Working with the leader and his team, we collected data on the current state of processes, systems, skills and outcomes. A new framework was introduced and adopted over time via both advisory and team training work. New pace and focus of communications helped the team clarify, prioritize and drive their own work and contribution margin.

Outcomes:

Dramatic improvement in client satisfaction. profitability of the team, as well as leader and team experience of daily work. Team resolving their own conflicts and find optimizations based on shared values and models.

Case 3 – New Leader Promotion

Situation:  

Promotion required the leader earn influence and prove the value of contributions across siloed, unfamiliar business units and teams. 

Setting: 

Large Hospital

Advisory client work:

Bi-weekly advisory calls to introduce a framework for earning influence.  Advisory on clarifying relevant and unique opportunities to become visible to senior leadership.  Clarification of materials and approaches to earning influence with senior leadership.

Outcomes:

Invitation to work directly with C-suite to drive strategic transformation initiatives across business units.  

Case 4 – Team Frustration

Situation:  

Team frustration with unclear, shifting, weak senior leadership.

Setting: 

Medical devices

Advisory client work:

After 360o feedback and analysis, top leader was unwilling to address his own challenges, so we worked with middle management to build the clear priorities, processes and systems they needed to deliver results.

Outcomes:

Record revenues with fewer, more values-aligned employees. Improved employee experience and lower turnover than anticipated.

Bespoke advisory solutions 

We would enjoy learning about your situation and vision for what’s next.  Reach out and we’ll find a time to learn more about you.

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