Encouraging Awareness, Transparency, and Accountability
Coaching Style
Matt’s coaching style is simple and effective. Matt believes that favorable and lasting coaching success comes from leaders understanding their strengths and development needs, knowing how those strengths and opportunities affect others and the organization, committing to different types of thinking, feeling, and behavior, and leveraging the people and other resources that can help them. His approach encourages awareness, transparency, and accountability.
Coaching Services
Coaching relationships are based on the needs of the leader and his or her organization. Generally, such engagements range from 3-6 months. Longer coaching relationships are also available as needed. Unlike others who enter the coaching field from other vocations, much of Matt’s extensive career has focused on building individual, team, and organizational capability. He is well qualified to help in the following areas, among others.
Leadership & Executive Coaching
As leaders grow, they often have fewer completely transparent relationships. The number of people with whom they can confide shrinks while their need for such relationships grows. Executive coaching helps to close this gap. Matt has been described often as a highly trustworthy, caring, and tough coach who delivers feedback skillfully and courageously, which is often what senior leaders need most.
Transition Coaching
Many people new to leadership roles or those transitioning into larger leadership roles are not prepared sufficiently for rapid success. For that reason, many new or newly promoted leaders believe that “doing more of the same” work that made them successful will help them in their new role. Matt helps such leaders understand the leadership behaviors that will help them most in their new role, and he designs results-focused learning activities to support their success.
Corrective Coaching
Matt’s career also includes extensive experience in employee relations. He understands how to address performance issues more courageously and creativity than internal leaders might be willing or able to do. Matt’s support is especially helpful when working with high-potential, low-performance leaders for whom the organization needs to make a difficult decision. As an experienced business leader and talent strategist, Matt is a trusted resource for helping organizations make such decisions.
Coaching Approach
Matt believes that the most successful coaching relationships focus on the following activities:
Discovery
Coaching leans mostly into each client's strengths and the unique opportunities that he or she has to be successful. Such an approach also lays bare the challenges that have historically been hidden either by choice or circumstance. There are many ways to achieve both in this balanced approach; the most common include written or in-person 360s and respected tools that measure leadership potential.
Definition
Clarifying the areas upon which he and the client should focus most; knowing and defining what matters most to the client, his or her leader, and the organization they serve together. This is generally achieved during candid discussions between Matt, the client, his or her leader, and any HR or OD sponsor that might be involved.
Design
Building actionable consensus around a plan that addresses opportunities without fear or favor; creating a way forward that honors everyone affected. Such a plan includes specific activities, expected results, timelines, and support resources.
Delivery
Working through the plan with remote and in-person observations and discussions, as scheduled. This includes updating regularly the client's leader and sponsors to ensure that the desired results are achieved.