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If leadership was easy, anyone could do it.

 

Executive Coaching elevates leaders.  

Executive Coaching

You are being watched. Your words and actions matter.  
Intent and Purpose in what you do, say and how you say it. 

Becoming, Staying, and Succeeding as a Leader   

An Executive Coach is a trusted guide on your leadership journey. Extra eyes, honest feedback, overlapped agenda. Helping you on the journey to become a leader and then helping you guard and protect your leadership position.  

A long, well-navigated journey from apprentice to leader enables your antennae, skills and abilities to develop, but sometimes the journey to leadership is sudden and gaps need to be filled. Sometimes you want to accelerate your journey to leadership. Sometimes you have to defend your leadership to remain in post. 

Everyone needs a coach - Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

Everyone around a leader has their own agenda. Your agenda is the only focus of an Executive Coach. 

Do you want a tribe of followers or pay-cheque prisoners?

A CEO client asked: "Why can't we just fire all the employees and only recruit believers?" 

I responded: "That's what we are trying to do - to convert employees into believers. We are trying to fix the too-fast, flawed onboarding and get back the "corporate culture" of the founders." 

The company had grown too fast and the new staff now outnumberfed the founding faithful. The company culture had changed. Salaries, perks and travel expense forms were suffocating the founding fervour of the initial mission.  

Do you want a loyal tribe of repeat customers and clients?

If they know about you and your business, they have an opinion and a story about you - whether you like it or not. If they do not know you, there is a story vacuum which you should fill, before someone fills it with a story you do not like. 

As a leader you have to start with a story. 

When you talk about your business, it's a story. When your team talks about your business, it's an advertisement. When your clients talk about your business, it's proof. - Dave Gerhardt

I bought an air-fryer, or more precisely joined the air-fryer cult, because my friends are air-fryer evangelists. They told me stories about how air-fryers were "life-changing". I am also a loyal member of the tribes of Apple and Zoom.  

Do you and your business have people working for you and buying from you or tribes of believers?  

Leadership responsibility: Corporate culture boosts, or plagues, a business.  

Startups and fast growth companies can have their founding culture overwhelmed by new hires. Like a fast-moving, small speedboat taking on new passengers who can change "the vibe" on the boat and impact the pace and direction. 

Large businesses have the inertia of a big ship. When new people come on board they are infected with the good, or the bad, corporate culture of the majority. Changing the direction of a ship takes intense focus and continued energy.

And clarity of thought and excellent communication.

The culture of a company is the responsibility of the leader of the business. What the leader says matters.  

Everyone needs a Coach

Sports stars have coaches. That's why they are stars. 

What Is an Executive Coach?

How can an Executive Coach change your life? 

How would your life change if? 

  • your tenure at the top had an extra five years?
  • your compensation package (STIP, LTIP, salary, options, benefits, and bonuses) went up 12%, 15% or 20%?
  • you were promoted? 
  • you were made redundant?

What would these mean to you financially and compounded over the next five years? If you did the maths, I assume it would mean a LOT of extra zeros. 

How would an Executive Coach help you?

How can you achieve the good things and avoid the bad things? How can you achieve that fast? 

An Executive Coach gives you transparent, honest feedback about your abilities, guides you to improve and holds you to account - helping you become a more successful leader and improving all your key numbers. Faster.  

People are not good at seeing themselves as others see them. A coach really, really helps. Everybody needs a coach - Eric Schmidt, CEO Google.

An Executive Coach reduces the time for your personal development. So you achieve the same or better results in a fraction of the time. An Executive Coach is both an accelerant and a focus.  

Who is your Executive Coach?

Who Can You Trust? Who has your interests, and only your interests, at heart?

As a leader, who do you have on your side? 

Warren Buffet had Charlie Munger. 

Elon Musk has Larry Ellison. 

Mark Zuckerberg had Steve Jobs and has Peter Thiel.

Bill Gates has Warren Buffet. “I have been learning from him since the day we met in 1991.”

Richard Branson had Sir Freddie Laker. “I wouldn't have got anywhere in the airline industry without ...Sir Freddie.”

Lady Gaga had Elton John. “Elton’s always really challenged me to take care of my artistry and to take care of myself.”

Is it a ridiculous idea for you to hire an Executive Coach?

As a business leader I have turned around and run businesses. I can relate to the challenges you face.

As a Storytelling Coach and a Speaker Coach, I have coached over 300 speakers on the famous red circle of the elite TEDMED and TED family.

I have helped thousands of business leaders from a range of industries and nearly 200 parliamentarians craft, distill and deliver their stories. Better. Faster. 

Imagine what you could achieve if you could speak in a way that makes your audience put down their phones and really listen to you, absorb what you say and respond to your words... in the way you want.

prime minister

I help people with two things. One is what they say. And the second thing is how they say it.

In 2003, during over 140 hours spread over ten intense 10 days, I refined and streamlined the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka's revolutionary United Nations peace speech.

Writing an important speech for a big event is typically a high-pressure task, but wrongly often neglected by the speaker until the event looms and the pressure and the task is delegated to a speechwriter.

Like Obama and Clinton who both worked alongside their speechwriters, the then Sri Lankan Prime Minister, later President Ranil Wickremesinghe, understood the power and potential of a speech, but he also recognised the significance of effective storytelling, speechwriting and speaker coaching. 

He granted me access to his thoughts and meetings during our ten days and late evenings in New York. We hadn't met before, but this deep dive where I was in the room for most of his meetings enabled me to observe, soak up, and grasp his speaking style, mannerisms, preferred vocabulary, and unique voice.

We practised his speech late at night after his relentless schedule of meetings was over, in his Secret Service-protected corner suite opposite the U.N.G.A. He understood that work in equals results out.

We were preparing for the speech in the United Nations Nations Plaza Hotel and the speech was taking place in the U.N. But he wasn't only addressing the U.N.

For this speech, the people in the room were not the priority; the people of Sri Lanka was our audience. His audience was the people on the other side of the red, green and blue dots of the cameras. 

This leader, this Prime Minister, had an ambitious vision of a peaceful Sri Lanka, and our 10-day partnership allowed me to craft, rewrite, polish and finalise a speech and then help him deliver it in a way that resonated deeply. We ditched jargon. We used small words for his big ideas. 

The welcome he received when he returned to Sri Lanka was overwhelming. He needed over 8 hours to travel the 30-kilometre journey from Bandaranaike International Airport to his official residence in Colombo, because a jubilant crowd of over 100,000 people gathered to greet him.

His speech moved his nation and changed history.

Imagine what something similar could do for you, your business and your legacy.

Executive Coaching: How Could We Work Together?

You are short on time - we can deal with that. In an ideal world, all your communication is proactive and scheduled, but life isn’t like that. Sometimes, you must react to opportunities or “situations” that need your intervention.

For proactive or scheduled events, like an AGM or mid-year or annual All Hands/Town Hall communication sessions, we can schedule in time on the weekend at your home or on Zoom - where and when it suits you.

When things happen and you have to react, a WhatsApp message is enough for me to scramble to work with you on whatever has come up in the business that warrants an intervention from the CEO.

Everything you say must be your words and voice and be in tune with your marketing and communications teams.

Speak To Me In Confidence

This kind of coaching relationship is personal. People who work together at this level on things this important must understand each other and click. Feel free to leave the page, or schedule a confidential 1-2-1 Zoom call directly with me (no assistants) and let's see if we get on. Or use the WhatsApp button. No bots, just Botting.