Leadership

The Business of Learning, Special Episode: Leadership Coaching and Development

Sponsored26 min read

Today’s business environment is marked by rapid shifts in how we work and learn, and businesses across industries need effective leaders who can guide their teams into the future. However, developing leaders who can succeed despite these shifts isn’t easy. Fortunately, leadership — just like any other skill — can be learned through ongoing training and development.

In this episode of The Business of Learning, sponsored by Sounding Board, Inc., we spoke with Lori Mazan, co-founder, president and chief coaching officer at Sounding Board, Inc., to learn more about leadership coaching and development. 

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To learn more about developing impactful leaders, download the complimentary job aid below, brought to you by Training Industry’s Leading Leadership Development Certificate program: 

The transcript for this episode follows: 

Speaker:

Welcome to The Business of Learning, the learning leader’s podcast from Training Industry.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Hi, welcome back to The Business of Learning. I’m Michelle Eggleston Schwartz, editor-in-chief at Training Industry, here with my co-host Sarah Gallo, a senior editor.

Sarah Gallo:

Welcome. Before we begin, here’s a brief message from Sounding Board, Inc., the sponsor for this episode.

Ad:

Sounding Board is a scalable leadership development platform, combining technology and leadership coaching to drive business impact for global enterprises. Our coach management system helps you accelerate the development of your leaders with a globally managed, fully vetted network of world class coaches. Our integrated technology platform is designed to lift administrative burden and make leadership coaching manageable, measurable and scalable. Learn more at www.soundingboardinc.com.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Being a leader has never been easy. But in today’s business environment, which is marked by challenges like digital transformation, navigating a post-pandemic workplace, and leading dispersed teams, being a leader is perhaps harder than ever before. Fortunately, leadership, just like any other skill, can be learned through ongoing training and development. Today, we’re speaking with Lori Mazan, co-founder, president, and chief coaching officer at Sounding Board, Inc., to learn how coaching can help develop effective leaders. Lori has spent 25 years coaching C-suite executives to develop critical leadership capabilities that have immediate and positive business outcomes. Some of the companies that have benefited from her expertise include Fortune titans like Chevron, Sprint, and Citibank, as well as venture-backed high growth companies like in Intellikine, Tapjoy, and 10x Genomics. Lori, welcome to the podcast.

Lori Mazan:

Thanks, Michelle. Happy to be here.

Sarah Gallo:

Yes. Welcome, Lori. Leadership coaching just really emerged as a way to develop leaders who can kind of navigate all of those challenges that Michelle mentioned. Before we dive in, I think it’d be helpful if you could define leadership coaching for us and maybe provide some context on what it looks like in today’s business environment.

Lori Mazan:

Leadership coaching, can I give a little history too? Because leadership coaching has actually been around since the ’90s. It was kind of this little secret weapon idea. It was behind closed doors. Exec[s] use coaches to be more successful, but they didn’t want anyone to know that they used a coach, because the perception was only people who are derailed were using coaches. It was like a little secret thing for a while. In probably 2010 or so, it started getting a little more visible. Since just before the pandemic, now suddenly coaching is the way to develop leaders. One of the reasons is it’s very in-depth and it’s very fast. Leadership coaching is really a systematic learning process where a coach facilitates development on a set of leadership capabilities.

The way this happens is, at least at Sounding Board, to uncover the leader’s underlying thinking and belief systems and sort of identify the things that are holding them back as a leader, shift their thinking around those things, and then generate new behavior out of that new thinking that then they practice and refine. That new thinking actually sticks because it’s not a rote practice model. It actually is a transformationally new way of operating. A rote practice is actually not bad. We do that all the time in like the gym or whatever. But under stress for leaders, those rote practice actions tend to drop off. Under stress, we tend to go back to whatever our natural is. But if our thinking has changed, now our natural is that new thinking. Those new behaviors tend to stick over time. The other is because coaching is very individualized, it’s customized to the individual and the environment that they work in, that development is very fast. What used to take eight to 10 years in old time enterprise leader development takes like six months to a year now because of that one-on-one very personalized development.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Definitely. It’s definitely a long process. With advancements in this one-on-one, we’re able to advance and accelerate learning for leaders. That’s great to hear. I think it’s important to mention that there are many different leadership coaching approaches and methods.

Lori Mazan:

There really are.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

At Sounding Board, you’ve developed your own approach to leadership coaching. Can you describe the Sounding Board way coaching philosophy and why is this approach an effective way to develop leaders?

Lori Mazan:

I was an executive coach for now almost 25 years. I saw what worked and didn’t work over that period of time, and not just for myself. I had a group of coaches that worked for me as well, and then I also participated in like creating a group of specific coaches for companies like Genentech. I got to see how lots of different people coach and what worked and didn’t work. Sometimes the coaching style is related to the person being coached needs. You might take a different style with different people. But what we do at Sounding Board is we create like a framework for the coaches to work within. What this does is because we’re delivering lots and lots of coaching at a company, it gives everyone kind of a consistent experience because they’re all having the same frame to the picture, but then the picture is created individually by that coach and the person being coached. We have a set of almost like principles that we utilize to create that commonality of experience. I’ll go through some of them. One of them is coach first and from the start. Coaching traditionally started with a get to know you session. Because our coaching is automated and we gather a lot of information up front so that the two participants can get to know each other, we actually encourage and train our coaches to coach on the first session. The impact of that is, one, right away they can feel the value of the coaching. The second is it deepens the trust between the two participants really rapidly because they’re already getting down to the tangible work of the coaching right in the first session. That’s our first principle. We also have coach the person in the context of their leadership. This gets to how many different kinds of coaching. There’s career coaching. There’s wellness coaching. There’s mental health coaching, weight loss coaching, transition coaching, like you’re moving from one job or one profession to another, retirement coaching, educational coaching. There are so many different kinds of coaching, but the coaching that we do is really leadership coaching. It’s not enough to have the person develop as a person, that development has to show in the context of their leadership role. That meaning it goes beyond the individual being coached and expands almost like that water droplet idea to the environment they’re working in. We have a second one related to that, which is develop the individual leader to have a greater organizational impact. That’s because the premise of leadership is you are not just doing this for yourself. You are a leader of other people and really a leader of the organization. When you develop yourself, your impact is much broader than just for you. We actually want that to be visible and named and have that as an intended outcome. And then I’ll say the last one, which is… We have a couple more, but I probably don’t have to go into all of them. We have changed the mindset and the thinking to create lasting change in behavior. That’s the one I talked about first. And then my favorite one, ours is boldly level up the leader. A lot of people perceive coaching to be almost like enhanced listening, where they’re like, “Oh, tell me more about that. What do you think about this? What do you think about that?” Our coaches are expert listeners, but we also encourage them to bring additional thinking and information to the engagement. If somebody just needs a listener, they have friends. They have colleagues. They have other ways to do that. But what the coach can uniquely bring is a point of view on their leadership and observations of how they’re interacting that nobody else can really tell this person. The coach is just neutral champion of that individual, and so they’re able to say things that other people can’t say in service of that individual’s growth. That means boldly say what you see. If you see this interaction going on and you can have an idea about what is either helping or hurting the individual, then it’s the coach’s job to name that and bring that to the coaching.

Sarah Gallo:

Yeah, definitely. Super important. It’s crazy to think that, like you mentioned, you’ve been doing this work for around 25 years, which is amazing. I’m sure you have just so many kind of personal stories and success stories. Could you maybe share one with our listeners about maybe a success story that stood out to you or that really kind of shows the impact that leadership-

Lori Mazan:

Well, I’ll give you two types of that. I actually just was doing a leadership offsite for a team of leaders at one of our customer companies. One of the C-suite leaders came up to me and said, “If it wasn’t for Sounding Board, I don’t think we would have any leaders in this company,” which I thought was really funny, but it’s a science company. There’s lots and lots of Ph.D. scientists. Remember, those people never get trained in leadership and yet they’re running a company. It was a little bit of a fun way for him to say how impactful leadership coaching is. I would say the most important stories that I would have are people that the result of their coaching was a huge success. Actually this is a story of how I met my co-founder. I was coaching the CEO of a venture-backed company that went from zero to a hundred million in three years. That meant the company grew also from zero to three, four, 500 people in that amount of time. That was a big success. Another CEO I coached, I started coaching him when the company was also venture-backed private company, pretty small. I got connected with him because his board was questioning his ability to continue to lead the company as the original founder. And now he is the CEO of a publicly traded, doing very well company. He said if it wasn’t for coaching, he wouldn’t still be the CEO. Just those like impacts. And then there’s just so many stories about enhanced teams, promotion, retention, engagement that coaching facilitates through the individual that’s being coached.

Sarah Gallo:

Very cool. It’s great to hear those real world kind of firsthand stories. I’d like to touch on another thing we mentioned before, which was that we’re kind of still living in these unprecedented times, so to speak, and being a leader today really isn’t easy. Can you break down some of those very real challenges that today’s leaders are facing and how can coaching help solve them?

Lori Mazan:

I said this thing kind of at the beginning of the pandemic, which is leaders need to do the same thing they always needed to do, but weren’t doing. Now it’s critical that they do it. Things like communication alignment, directions, strategic planning, like all of the standard capabilities are still the same, but it’s like everything is harder and more difficult. You have remote or hybrid work, which a lot of people aren’t familiar with. You’re having great resignation, really short tenures. When I started coaching, people stayed in their jobs like 12 to 18 years. Now the average is like 2.8 or something. Just that turnover and how do you build a team when your team members keep departing and you’re having to add new folks. I also think the continuous pandemic… I was just seeing yesterday like, oh, prediction for a big surge in the fall and the winter. It’s like, really? We’re still doing this? Okay, we’re still doing this. That’s very wearing on leaders. And then also we have a lot of economic uncertainty right now as well. I kind of feel like leaders are just highly burdened. A way the coach can help is really a couple ways. One of the things when you’re a leader is you don’t have people to talk to about things. If you’re at the top of the organization, you really can’t talk to anybody because everybody wants something from you. If it’s your board, your executive team, your employees, your investors, whoever it is, they all want something from you. No one’s neutral. If you’re more in the earlier middle stages of your leadership career, it’s similar, which is people are on your team. You can’t talk to them, not honestly. Then you have peers, but a lot of times there’s competition and politics among the peers. And then you have to be selective what you talk to your manager about. Who are you able to deeply discuss these hard circumstances that we’re living in? A neutral coach from outside the organization is the perfect person. The trust is very deep. You can say anything. You can vent your frustration. You can problem solve. You can elevate your thinking. You can do all the things with a coach that make this kind of environment livable. And then it gives you the opportunity to use these hard situations to really elevate yourself as a leader. I think coaching has just taken off since the beginning of the pandemic. I really think that’s one reason why the needs and demands on leader has grown exponentially, and therefore the needs of leaders to have a valued, trusted thinking partner and how to handle all of these things is critical. Now, how people are going to handle all of this really depends on the company and the style of leadership in the company. There isn’t just one right way. There’s the right way for that leader in that company in these circumstances. It’s really hard to get that without a more customized approach to development and learning.

Sarah Gallo:

I love what you mentioned about just having that neutral kind of ear to listen from outside the organization. I think that’s just super important for anyone, not when you’re in an ongoing pandemic. That’s definitely a good benefit. I think it’s important to mention too that, of course, when it comes to training, there are so many different delivery methods. There’s in person workshops and online courses. What are some of those benefits of using coaching for leadership development versus maybe a more formal training approach?

Lori Mazan:

I actually think both are needed and they’re not mutually exclusive. By the way, I was in training and development for a long time and taught a wide range of soft skills, including leadership skills. I say soft, just not technical training. I really value the training aspects. One way I think that’s really useful to the organization is it creates a common language and point of view for everybody who’s participating in an organization. Also, like delivery of information and sort of increasing awareness, you can do that in a group setting or online setting or however you want to do it. It doesn’t have to be done one-to-one. I think there’s sort of a baseline there that is really useful if provided in a training delivery method. And then what I really like and we used to do this at my training organization a long time ago in the early stages of coaching is training plus coaching. You have all the benefits that training can deliver, and then you add a coach on there and that coach helps the participant apply the training to their specific situation. I don’t know if you used the Kirkpatrick Model. It was kind of a standard model for evaluating training. A lot of the training I did only hit levels one and two. We didn’t get all the way down to level four, but I feel like training plus coaching hits all four levels. When you’re talking leadership, it’s really useful for new or advancing leaders to have like basic training, whether it’s basic management training if it’s from the company, how to handle various things from the company point of view, if it’s trying to help the leadership in the organization operate on the same leadership approach, if it’s having to do with culture, all of that is really usefully forwarded by training. And then you just layer the coaching on top. In fact, our customers ask us all the time for training. The other thing I’d say about that is we do offer also group coaching, which is a little… It’s like in between coaching and training in the sense. It’s peer facilitated. I mean, peer groups, but coach facilitated learning also on a set of leadership capabilities, but it’s more informational. People share their actual activities and they can share their actual problems and get feedback from their peers on that. In my mind, in terms of development, it goes training, group coaching, one-on-one coaching, like that, as you start to develop your capabilities more and more.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Definitely. Again, that blended approach, using multiple modalities is really going to create that impactful experience.

Lori Mazan:

Yes, and kind of a well-rounded one.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Yeah, definitely. When it comes to initially launching this type of training program, what tips do you have for training managers who want to roll out a leadership coaching program, but they don’t know where to get started? Kind of what are those first steps?

Lori Mazan:

I know, and it’s super complicated. Literally I said, “I probably shouldn’t say this, but if you want to, you should just call Sounding Board,” because now we have it kind of perfected and automated. But I’ll tell you kind of the steps. When you start hearing the steps, you’re like, “Oh, this is complicated.” One of the reasons I actually started Sounding Board is because managing coaching is difficult. I saw companies trying to do this for a lot of years and it took a lot of time and energy from people and wasn’t always that successful. Using technology and then a managed coaching approach seems to have done the trick to make this easy to implement. But here you go if you want to DYI. First, you have to identify who you think would benefit from coaching. I really encourage training managers to go beyond any nine box approach. That really categorizes people into high potential or not. Sometimes those categorizations are pretty subjective and not objective. I would look broader. You can use your nine box if you want to, but I would look broader than that. Like who do you see moving into various leadership levels over the next three to five years? Who needs prep? Who is struggling at the moment who could get some support? Who needs more accelerated, like maybe they were just promoted to a manager and they’re on the track to be a director three months from now, or people who need accelerated development?

And then also because of the high turnover, people who are going to be promoted into openings that really probably aren’t trained already for those openings, coaching can help all of those. And then as well as all your regular programs like DEI programs, we do a lot of women’s leadership programs or different DEI programs. You can also look at your functional groups. We [coach] a lot of people in the technology function because they end up only having training in their function, not having training as a leader, and yet those functions still need leaders in the organizations. It may be like, hey, in your engineering group, you have a whole series of leaders that really haven’t ever had any kind of development, including training. You can start to take a look at what are the various needs, and then where does training fit those needs, where does coaching fit those needs, and start to sort. Once you do that, now you have to check interest. Because like training, coaching doesn’t work well if people don’t want to do it. The participant has to be invested for there to be impact. One thing that’s nice about coaching though, in a training, you get a limited amount of time to help the participant buy in. In coaching, that relationship tends to develop over time. People who are participating in coaching tend to get bought in over time. But asking their interest level is usually a good way to start. In terms of managing the coaching, it works pretty well if you can get people into like a cohort. Sounding Board uses a programmatic approach. If you have different groups that you want to give coaching to, you can have it set up as a program and manage each of those independently, and then all the data can still be aggregated. But usually you have to sort into a program or a cohort just to help yourself from going insane. And then you have to determine the coach matching process. The traditional matching process was self-select. People would either find their own coaches or the organization would offer them like three coaches and they’d have to interview those coaches and decide which one they wanted. Sounding Board, We do it differently. One, because if you’re delivering a lot of coaching, that takes a lot of time. And two, over my career, I found out that people tend to choose the coach that is most like themselves. It’s kind of one of those unknown bias things. That coaching doesn’t work that well because they tend to kind of think the same about things, and so there isn’t a lot of room for development there. Sounding Board, we have an automated coach matching process based on algorithm. The way we set it up is to have a standard deviation between the approach of the coach and the coachee so that they’re not exactly the same and kind of like paid best friends, and they’re not so far away that they don’t have a meeting of the mind to get some there and there. If you’re hand matching, that takes a little bit of time and ability to be able to do that yourself. But you have to figure out a way to match the coach to the coachee. And then you got to help them get off to a good start. Really explaining to the person being coached the process and how it works and making sure the coach knows the developmental needs of this individual that they’re working with. Then you’re going to have to track and measure it. There’s lots of tracking and measurement that you can do, just engagement tracking. Are they actually doing their sessions? How many sessions are they doing? Where are they in the progress of the coaching engagement? And then you have all your development data, so measuring the impact of the coaching. Is this person developing as a leader? And then making sure that people around that leader can see that develop. In other words, the development’s not just inside the individual, but it’s visible to the folks around them as well. It’s nice if you can aggregate that data, because then you can find out which coaches are being impactful and which are not being so impactful and who is really being able to develop as a leader and in which capabilities and how fast. Once you get all that going, you’re going to follow up on the matches. Make sure they work out. You’re going to handle any issues. You’re going to have to create a completion process, so what comes at the end of the coaching. And then one of the most important things is how do you engage the participant’s manager in the whole process? A traditional problem with coaching was it was only self-report. The coach only knew what the person being coached told them. It’s much more effective if the manager’s involved, then there’s some kind of manager alignment meetings or a way for the manager to give input and also for the manager to weigh in on their development. And that can be really tricky. I’ll tell you a quick story about that. I coached a guy in a biotech company and the manager told me that this individual was like the bane of their existence. That every day there were some kind of issue around this person. We were coaching. We coached for three months. I go back to talk to the manager and I’m like, “Wow. What differences did you notice?” And the manager says, “I didn’t notice any difference.” And I’m like, “Hmm, really? Is this individual still the bane of your existence?” They were like, “Oh no. They’re not. Actually I have another one now.” And I’m like, “You told me before that you had to deal with this person every day.” And then the guy was like, “Oh my gosh! I don’t think I’ve even heard about him or talked to him in like six weeks.” I said, “Do you consider that development that now this person is no longer the bane of your existence?” And then he was like, “Oh my gosh, yes. I didn’t even notice that.” Sometimes you have to actually train the manager and what to look for because they don’t even really not noticing that enough. You think about the manager, they have a thousand things going on. What stands out for managers are the problem people. Once they’re not a problem person anymore, it’s not capturing their attention. It even takes skills to try to work with the managers and help them see the development. In the second half of that engagement, I was like, well, that’s not good enough just that he moved off being the number one problem. Let’s have him be on the plus side now. Three more months and the first participant was able to be like the star of the group. It switched from the manager thinking they were the bane of their existence to this is my go-to person. All that checking and tracking makes a big difference in terms of the impact of the coaching. You see, there’s a lot of steps to this. One thing that happens with Sounding Board is companies have whole groups of people that manage coaching and they can move off to other things or to the higher level coaching kinds of things because our software can manage all of that stuff automatically.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Definitely. You touched on this previously, but I kind of wanted to circle back to it because it’s I think an important area for our audience. That comes to measuring the impact of training programs. That’s just so important, but it is so challenging. I was wondering if you could offer any additional tips or best practices our listeners can use to measure the impact of leadership coaching programs.

Lori Mazan:

Yeah. One of the ways I think it makes it a little easier to break this down is to separate the kind of data that you’re wanting to surface. The first level data I just call engagement data. Are they having their sessions? Are they doing whatever that involves? Is the match good? That kind of just engagement data. Did they complete at the time that was stated? That’s easier to track. We know a lot of our large customers, we’re just tracking that on a spreadsheet. Some we’re tracking it on paper still, but that part’s at least pretty easy to track. The next level, which is development data, is a lot harder to track. How do you know if someone actually is developing as a leader? You can separate things into development versus activity. What a lot of companies do is they track activity, like I read a book. I went to a training, right? I did X thing. But that doesn’t tell you what the impact of doing that was. Did it actually improve them as a leader? We don’t really know. We know they did the activity. We don’t know what the impact of that activity was. Being able to assess the impact is much more challenging. I don’t think it solved all the way yet myself, but I can tell you at Sounding Board what we do is we have this set of leadership capabilities that then we can measure development against. I think it’s really useful for the companies to identify what they think is a good leader and then training, coaching, reading a book, whatever it is, can fuel that development and be measured. And then we measure it by survey of the person being coached. How confident do you feel in these sets of capabilities? But we also measure it by feedback through survey from the manager. I think it’s not good enough for the leader to think they got better. We have to match that with data that’s visible to the outside. Because of our coaching model of change your thinking to change your behavior, usually the first part of the coaching engagement really is an inside job. They’re changing, how they think about being a leader. And then the second half is really how are they applying that in their work environment. By the end of the engagement, the changes that they have made are visible to others, and then measuring that as well. I think there’s another layer to go where it’s not survey data. Sounding Board is starting to work there where we’re utilizing data from the HRS system and different things to try to create a more comprehensive view of the development. And then that gives you the opportunity to create some predictive data as well. It’d be nice if there were some way to feedback like, “Hey, this person’s ready for the next level of leadership,” or, “Oh, you want to promote this person? I would give it a little more time and a little more coaching, training development work.”

Sarah Gallo:

Those are some great tips too. What we’ve definitely heard is a big challenge. I think it’s worth mentioning too that a lot of our listeners are in leadership roles themselves. Do you have any tips on how they can become better coaches and really what skills make for a good coach?

Lori Mazan:

Yeah, yeah. I love leaders as coaches. One of the little side benefits of coaching is after six months of coaching, the leader has been coached and they kind of absorb that coaching approach kind of by osmosis. They just naturally start doing that for others, providing that for others. They always come back and be like, “Oh my gosh, you won’t believe it. I was coaching my direct report,” and they’re always surprised. But they just start to understand the dynamic of the interaction that deepens the thinking and they just start naturally utilizing it. I’m going to actually name a couple of skills, but I just want to give this caveat, which is if you are a leader and you are wanting to coach people who report directly to you, remember that there’s a power differential, power status role. It’s not going to be the same as a neutral outside coach because you still have the power to hire and fire them and set their comp package. The person on the receiving side may not be fully all and open to you because there’s other ramifications. And that’s also true if you are coaching peers or you’re trying to coach your boss, but that doesn’t mean leaders can’t use coaching skills. I would say the number one coaching skill is actually listening for direct reports. It’s kind of listening versus helping. I think leaders often want to help their folks, but that doesn’t develop the capability of the individual themselves. Just listening and helping them, really identify the problem and where the struggle is and that kind of thing, really useful. If you’re coaching above, it’s really tempting to be reactive or debate what others are telling you. Again, just listening can be really useful. I think the second skill is what I call uncovering. You’re trying to really uncover some layers and get to the heart of the issue, whether it’s the heart of the problem to be solved, or if it’s the heart of the individual’s thinking or belief or bias, whatever it is. You’re really trying to uncover versus advising. Because leaders tend to be more seasoned, they want to help by telling other people how to do this the best way they know how. But again, that doesn’t develop the other person. It might help them solve the problem. But then the next problem, they still have to come back to the leader and say, “How did you do this? What do you want to… What should I do?” You want to get down to the source of things and help the leader develop a competency there that they didn’t have before they were talking to you. The third is commitment. That once you have these more in depth conversations, you want to have the person you’re coaching or using coaching skills with to commit to some kind of action or behavior change or solution. And then you also want to follow up. The follow-up can be super simple just like, “How did that go?” But without a follow-up, that tends to fall off people’s plates. It doesn’t like close that little coaching loop. The commitment is really important along with the follow-up to make sure that that particular session topic got wrapped with a little bow. Now, if you’re a leader, you’re probably saying, “Oh my gosh, how am I ever going to have the time to do this with all of my direct reports or certainly with my boss or a peer or something like that?” It’s kind of like a pay me now or pay me later scenario. There was this old commercial a long time ago when we used to watch TV with commercials and it was for FRAM Oil Filter. The person brings their car into the garage is making a terrible noise. The mechanic’s saying thousands of dollars or whatever. The person’s like, “Well, do I have to do this right now?” And the mechanic replies, “Well, you can pay me now, or you can pay me later. It’s not going to matter. I’m still going on my Hawaiian vacation.” Right? Coaching is a little like that. You don’t have to take the time up front, but very likely you end up taking more time down the road because this becomes a repeated situation that keeps cropping up. You might have to be selective, like which situations or which people do you want to really invest your time in. And with those folks, you really help them to develop the underlying thinking that fuels capacity instead of just helping them, advising them, or solving the problem for them. Another thing leaders can do is remember, you’re a leader. You don’t have to do all this work yourself. You’re not an executor. You can actually set up peer groups with your employees or with some compatriots of yours. Cross-functionally set up two employees of two functional areas to help and coach each other. And that’s another way. Maybe you sit in with them one or two times and then you let them self-coach on their own. It may not be the same quality and all of that, but you’re still going to get some nice payoff for this. At least your people will have talked it over with somebody else before they come to you looking for a solution. Again, it starts to just help them think more strategically and transformatively. You could also go get trained as a coach. Lots of coach training programs right now. A lot of people in training development, HR, learning are just training themselves as a coach because those skills are just so useful across the board. I use my coaching skills all the time in sales, in managing an executive team, with my board. I basically use coaching skills at our all company meeting we just had last week. Basically I use coaching skills constantly to be successful as a leader.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Definitely. They’re so versatile. Before we wrap up today, are there any other key takeaways you’d like to leave our listeners with?

Lori Mazan:

What I wanted to leave people with is training and coaching is like peanut butter and jelly. They go together really well. I’m a fan of training. I was clearly in that role in the past. I don’t think that’s going away. I’ve heard so many people on the coaching side being, “We don’t need training anymore.” No, we do need training. We definitely do. I just like the coaching and training together. This was really in the ’90s even when coaching was just getting started. In a very intensive kind of interpersonal skill workshop that I used to teach, we just added three follow-up coaching sessions for all the participants to just help them apply the learning. It just made an amazing retention impact. The original training material is so good that you want people to utilize it, but it just took a little more reinforcement after the fact to make that something that people were using on an ongoing basis. I just really like that, whether it’s in person, it’s virtual, it can even be coaching as a follow-up tool. It doesn’t even have to be a person, right? It can be you send them something afterwards that’s basically like, “Oh, how did you apply this? What was challenging for you in applying this? How did this whatever? You guys already know those questions. That’s a form of written coaching. You’re just helping them think more deeply after the fact about the material that was delivered. I kind of like coaching and training together.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

Perfect. Well, that concludes this special episode of The Business of Learning. Lori, how can our listeners get in touch with you after today’s episode if they’d like to reach out?

Lori Mazan:

They can find me on LinkedIn, Lori Mazan, L-O-R-I M-A-Z-A-N. You can also email me directly if you want to, Lori, also L-O-R-I again, @soundingboardinc.com. If you’re going to email me directly, my only request is you put the name of this podcast in the subject line so I know who you are. I get literally like 500 emails a day or a thousand. I sort all those people who want to sell me something from the people who are wanting contact in some way. Feel free to reach out. Just put this podcast in your subject line so I know who you are.

Sarah Gallo:

To learn more about leadership coaching, check out the show notes for this episode at trainingindustry.com/trainingindustrypodcast.

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz:

As always, we welcome your feedback. Leave a review with your thoughts and ideas on your favorite podcast app. Until next time.

Speaker:

If you have feedback about this episode, or would like to suggest a topic for a future program, email us at info@trainingindustry.com or use the contact us page at trainingindustry.com. Thanks for listening to The Training Industry Podcast.

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