Our coaching sessions and programs are customized to achieve the goals of each client. The following examples are designed to give you a sense of the results participants gain and to spark a conversation about what we might do for you. In addition to the clients listed below, we work with leading companies in management consulting, investment banking, private equity, high tech, legal, consumer goods, healthcare, and a variety of other industries.
Faced with two air disasters and a deteriorating balance sheet, Malaysia Airlines set out to transform their business from top to bottom. Christoph Mueller was brought in as CEO, and he asked us to help the top 70 executives develop the leadership communication skills they needed to motivate people to think and act differently. We conducted a series of programs that emphasized:
Active listening and meeting facilitation — to break down the hierarchical communication culture, overcome resistance, and encourage innovation
A structured approach to meeting preparation and management — that enabled their leaders to be clear, concise, and direct, without being impolite
Improved body language — to increase presence — and a slower pace with more frequent pausing — to increase clarity for non-native English speakers
Before Malaysia Airlines, Christoph Mueller was CEO of Aer Lingus. In the following video, he explains his experience with us and the results he has seen.
The Chinese leadership team of the China division of the largest restaurant company in the world needed to adapt their skills to be successful speaking to diverse global stakeholders. Recognizing that Western investors had different expectations than their internal Chinese audiences, they asked us to help them step out of their comfort zones to adapt to those cultural differences. We helped them build storylines that effectively explained the challenges their business had faced, highlighted their success, and outlined their future growth potential — without overselling, reducing their integrity, or losing their individual personalities. We balanced this work on their messaging with sessions that helped them increase presence, eye contact, and overall impact.
In the following video, Murray Hennessy talks about his experience using our programs to develop his leadership teams at a number of companies — as well as the results he gained from working with us to prepare for significant events, such as selling one company and renegotiating the debt of another.
When Tony Chanmugam was the group CFO of one of the largest global telecoms, he launched a “Finance Leaders of the Future” initiative to transform his Finance leaders and high potentials from a reporting function into partners who help drive business results. He sponsored a series of our programs to build the communication skills needed to achieve this change. He recognized that his people needed to strengthen their ability to persuade stakeholders across business units and geographies, to pull everyone out of the details to focus on the actions that would drive results, and then to motivate people to follow through on their commitments.
Viktor Kovács first attended and then sponsored one of our programs at Cisco, where we helped his Eastern European region adapt the standard Cisco messaging to their marketplace and specific customers. In the video below he shares the results he saw when he invested in the management team of Neostratus — a company he founded after leaving Cisco — including building the team and gaining consensus on the message they needed to consistently bring to market.
Connecting to hearts as well as minds, to overcome skepticism
Facing increasing competition from companies that previously were not considered peers, the Chairman of a large retailer decided to inspire his employees by challenging how they applied their company values to make a difference. He wanted to bring about visible changes in behavior, but recognized the skeptics would be thinking: “What's new? We're doing this already!” He recognized he needed to approach his annual speech in a very different way to create a real change. After the speech he sent us the following note:
“In the course of my working life I've given more speeches than I care to count, but you've enabled me to look afresh at purpose, structure and delivery, and you've helped me to take a completely different approach to an event which I knew was one of the most crucial in my Chairmanship. So, I unhesitatingly rate the three days we spent together as exceeding my expectations.
Specifically: You took me away from the lectern and from delivering a fixed text. You've given me an approach to structuring my ideas and using boxes to contain and help me visualise the logical flow. And you've made me acutely aware of the advantages of brevity — and the need to be ruthless with waffle! Most of all, though, you gave me the confidence to show emotion — something which we Brits are not very good at! You'll doubtless pick up comments from members of the team, but they were rocked back by my honesty and uncomfortable at the challenge I gave them. Feedback has included the words 'inspirational' and 'motivating', and I'm sure I achieved a level of engagement with an audience that I would not have reached without McAlinden.”