Business Strategy &
Executive Leadership Coaching
About Me
I sit happily at the intersection of leadership development, strategy & communications. My 30 year long career in the tech sector has covered roles in software engineering, product marketing, business development, brand marketing, and market research, culminating in leading Intel's Corporate Strategy Office reporting directly to the CEO.
I have benefited from assignments in diverse business areas operating on three continents (Europe, North America & South America) that have allowed me to learn about different facets of business and how to best work in diverse cultural settings. My strong belief is that business performance always comes back to developing people and activating the power of good leadership.
I am an ICF accredited and Hudson Certified Executive Coach, a certified Birkman Assessment interpreter and Team Diagnostic Survey Practitioner. As the strategy lead for Intel’s Executive Coaching team, I am the proud recipient of the 2022 ICF PRISM award for coaching excellence.
Strategy Coaching
Good business strategies can not be developed or activated in a vacuum. To quote Freek Vermeulen’s excellent HBR article*, strategies often fail “because the firm does not have something worth executing. The strategy consultants come in, do their work, and document the new strategy in a PowerPoint presentation and a weighty report. Town hall meetings are organized, employees are told to change their behavior, balanced scorecards are reformulated, and budgets are set aside to support initiatives that fit the new strategy. And then nothing happens. One major reason for the lack of action is that “new strategies” are often not strategies at all. A real strategy involves a clear set of choices that define what the firm is going to do and what it’s not going to do. Many strategies fail to get implemented, despite the ample efforts of hard-working people, because they do not represent a set of clear choices”.
Instead of relying on the hired strategy consultants to toss their PowerPoints over the wall, my strategy coaching approach is designed to equip leaders with the tools, knowledge, insights, and leadership conviction that they need to formulate, activate and execute winning business strategies. To that end, strategy coaching combines a structured framework for strategy development with peer-to-peer coaching to help leaders gain clarity and commitment around their critical business strategies.
*Many Strategies Fail Because They’re Not Actually Strategies, Freek Vermeulen, Harvard Business Review, November 2018
My Coaching Methodology
I believe that every leader has the capacity to achieve whatever they are dreaming. My goal is to release and increase that capacity. I do this by listening, asking questions and by challenging you to think about issues differently and more deeply. In a coaching engagement we will partner to collect data about your current situation, identify aspirational and behavioral goals and then build and execute a plan that identifies strengths, obstacles, awareness building practices, techniques to strengthen new behaviors, stakeholders, and milestones. We will collaborate focusing on you as a whole person. You will be setting the agenda for our work together but you can always expect me to challenge you to bring out the best in you.
A typical coaching engagement lasts 4-6 months. During that time, I typically meet with clients every other week for about an hour (either face-to-face or via phone/videoconference). We might agree on “homework” (e.g. me asking you to reflect on / observe a behavior or you asking me to gather stakeholder feedback) – spacing our sessions out in this way will give us enough time to do the work in between but I’ll do my best to be available for you on short notice if something comes up.
In addition to 1:1 coaching, I work with leadership teams that are interested in learning how to optimize their interactions and implement proven methods to build healthy high-performing teams.
Connect with Me
LinkedIn
Mailing Address
675 Stamm Avenue
Mountain View, CA 94040
Email Address
Phone Number
+1 (650) 417 3567
Book time with me...
(c) Ries Coaching & Consulting LLC, EIN: 87-3834821