within their own lives and communities now here is our host welcome to new beginnings with karen delk and i am thrilled to have four wonderful executive coaches join me today we're going to learn more about them individually and the clients that they engage so welcome thank you and you're more than welcome you know that i've been anxious to get you all on this show and we're finally here so i just can't wait to you know have you share what you do with our audience so let me introduce odd really eileen wasserman mary mavis and anna raines so we are going to have a great time today so what i'd like to hear and mary you could start us off with tell us a little bit about yourself and the type of clients that you serve so i'm an executive coach i often think about it as being advisor and a partner to my clients if my mother were here she would tell since i was three i've been telling people what to do so not that i always tell clients what to do but really i guess the counsellor has always been a part of me when i went to college i thought i would be a high school guidance counselor and followed a course of study in psychology my software years somebody got me interested in business and human resources which was a fairly  new field at the time and so i started my career in human resources working with managers in how they coached in work with their employees and then i went into my first coaching practice back when we had to explain about coaching and really start from the very basics then i went into a consulting firm called simpson and company but you're right here in princeton is still in princeton and it was a strategic h r consulting firm and that's where i learned to be think about business strategy and think about the outcomes that people are trying to produce and eighteen years ago i went on my own and  doing work with leaders and teams typically around critical business outcomes i think that would be a common theme and often in very complex environments so that's really school for a very long time i finished two doctoral subspecialties and i started out as a clinician i did that for a number of years and then i got more interested in the context in which clients were operating and their cultural backgrounds and so i went ahead and did in industrial organizational psychology degree and my first job out of school was an academic teaching organization development and then i came back east to do a post doc and in the middle of that they were adding executive coaching to some of these executive leadership programs where i was working and someone said oh you have this background in individual and organizational change and you should be a coach and that is literally how i started coaching and then i built a practice in history in financial services and professional services and today i think of my work as a blend of executive coaching organizational consulting especially with tech enabled distributed organizations and collaboration's and i also do executive education so the kinds of industries i work would tend to be very knowledge intense aerospace professional financial services health care higher ed and i always am looking for transitions into new environments so into new leadership positions into new organizations  or into international transcultural leadership and that is why clients seek me out when they have a lot of complexity and change and want to help with cross cultural now ation issues wonderful wonderful  us a little bit about yourself well it's so interesting to me to hear your backgrounds and your path to executive coaching not unlike you mary i my background has been working with clients  organizations my trajectory in getting there was an undergraduate degree in human development and working in the area and a master's program in with a group process and working with people in the groups that they live and work with and started out in health care and in my work in health care i encountered the complexities of diversity in health care and that was early on in my career that was actually in the mid eighty's when looking at issues of diversity and inclusion at the workplace where the early see some of not just looking at what does it mean to have different people working together at the workplace people of different cultures be people with different backgrounds but what does it mean to have them fully engaged and fully contributing to the team and creating cultures that in that did so so i was working as an organizational development consultant and with executive leaders in creating inclusive work cultures and that was the early stages of my wir work as an executive coach only like you mary didn't call it executive coaching and more and more i would say over the last fifteen years the shining the light executive coaching has become a key frame in my work so i still do consulting and i teach in graduate programs in organizational development and leadership and i coach specifically in three areas one is i work whereas women leaders and so i work with women leaders and pharmaceutical companies and in health care organizations where there is a specific focus on developing the next generation of women leaders i also work a lot with the executive education program and i work with their executive women's executive leadership program i also work with c suite senior leaders i do that also at the wharton school and also in client systems where they are working to develop and i want to emphasize that in these situations people are doing well and they want to help them by even better not like twenty years ago when coaching was something different  know i also work with young leaders and i find myself fascinated and drawn to intergenerational work more and more and so i working with coaching and developing cohorts of both people who are in organizations and becoming leaders young leaders in business startups as well as organizations but also people who are wanting to grow in the field that we're at and i'm loving that great thank you very well i started my career in california the silicon valley in high technology marketing so i spent about twelve years doing that and then i moved to new york and discovered that what i actually really loved about business was the team's management and and really guiding the projects together and making all of that work and i've discovered that leadership  development was actually a field i didn't know that was an option i didn't even know what that really was but i suppose when i discovered it was probably when it was coming to the forefront as well for other companies so good timing when i moved here i made it big it's partner that i started working with and her practice really involved quite a bit of the leadership development side working with emerging leaders people who are in transition into into leadership roles but also specifically talking to asian and people of color and women in the workplace and how they can develop their careers and be take take control of their career trajectory so i started doing that work and that was really such a great coming together of a lot of my interests and my skill sets with business but also i really wanted to be in a career that could help people to discover who they are to realize their potential and also to find their context right like in an organization where they could really bring about change and and really flesh out and clarify their vision for that so i started working in that i've been in that for the last thirteen years and i  now in my own practice i do work with a lot of emerging leaders and people who are looking to step into leadership roles and defining what that means for them and also to help people of color define their identity and their roles within their within their organizations as well and along with that as many of you have talked about diversity to talk with the organizations about how they can better develop and develop their leaders as well as develop their culture to be more inclusive and to have to see how that fits into their organizational goals as well so that's really critical to not just develop the leaders but the organizations as well and to see how we can create that environment thank you ladies you bring i think if we add it all including me our experience we have a lot to bring to the to the marketplace and you know betts one of my wish is that we figure that out at some point when you have so much  yeah i mean you know we that's that's why i was anxious to do this show really because we there is there is overlap there's commonality but there's also growth for each of us individually and one of the things that if you to listen to our stories that's really defining about coaching now is to be successful as an independent practitioner you have to know who your clientele is and the work that really defines you your best work yet because clients are want they have all kinds of coaches coaching organizations lots of people like us and they're looking for you know  who you really are going to be the best fit for and so if you don't know that if you don't have the right wind your work where you can say i've done this work and here are the outcomes that i've had with the people i'm working with it's very hard yeah the other thing i hear among us is that there are levels that you can work with somebody at if you could work with them only as the individual you could work with them as the individual tax yes but critical to leadership coaching is really supporting the individual to grow in develop in the context of the system and have systems literacy y have the capacity to lead a team and have the capacity to be a good team player so i don't want to venture too much often to topics but that speaks to the idea of coaching  into city right but then it's not just you know i've got to be me and i have to be authentic but how can you do that in that context for the purposes of the organizational goals and so i thought i heard that a lot of what we're doing and also bringing ourselves right who we are into our coaching and our past experiences i think both personal and professional has that's really great absolutely absolutely and what do you find that your clients seek you out for i mean because it is mary said you know there are a lot of people who are professing to be coaches but what are your clients seeking you out to do so and i was one thinking about this on the way here great question so is thinking  people who seek me out when they are struggling with something having to do with system complexity and change and it's usually of a particular kind so very senior folks who want to work on their own executive agenda i love to support that i have often helped people for example executed strategy that's been developed by very strategy focused firms and the complexity of the execution is something that i'm particularly good at helping with  people also when they're not fitting in a global environment often seek me out and so i've done a lot of executive transitions to for ex pats positions or people with distributed global teams who are trying to figure out how do we really create trust and collaborate in an environment where people are all over the world and they speak different forms of english and they have different access and time zones and so they seek me out to work on those individual team issues yeah and i actually want that to be a question we follow up on because i'm sure many of us are finding this distributed work team different time zone s all of that so thank little gore in global yes i know it has recently bringing that up where i think that i mean when i did sort of looking at all my clients at some point when i was thinking about my work and who are my clients and i looked at the set of people who are my best clients and these are all really strong leaders so i think that's probably true for you where for all of us where the person who really engages you in helping you think about the organization think about the probably not anymore very often in a scenario where i'm starting with somebody who is really new in their in their career but they see a gap they they're seeing gap in i haven't dealt with this before and i'm smart enough to know that i need help and i want this confidential resource or the organization books that i love with a lot of people who they're putting somebody into a spot that they know is bigger than vulnerable are you perfectly yes being perfect right and people in those kinds of positions are not just dealing with learning they may be learning some new interpersonal behavior but they're also dealing with learning about yeah i also found it very interesting to think about that question and i would say that clients engage me for when they are wanting to enhance their communication and i don't mean communication from the traditional way of transmitting and what they say i mean communication from the standpoint of the meaning that they are making in an agile and emerging environment because communication and i wrote a book about this called communicating possibilities communication is really about how are we dancing together and i may have the best intentions of clarity and what i say even right now in this moment and maybe not really know what we're making together in telling here your response and when you're building on what i say i think yeah we're and we're dancing together and when you say something that goes like this you know it just is then that i need to be able to in the next moment be agile enough to work with you so that we're coordinating together so many leaders who are working as you all set in very very complex situations across time zones across cultures need to be able to act into that next moment  so that is communication and that's around understanding the complex dimensions of diversity i also do a lot of work in health care and health care has to be one of the most complex environments in terms of a multitude of  different generations different disciplines different shifts and i'm working with both pressures i mean that's what we're talking my life like as i'm talking about life and and so women physicians as well as you know i'm working doing a lot of work now with just people who are emerging leaders in their departments and that will include actually the one on one coaching but also observing them in the context of their teams and the one thing i we do work with m b a students as well as master's students and what i have off about that is i learned a lot about their worlds and so it really helps me that i'm working with senior leaders and i'm working with emerg leaders because i get a sense of those worlds that are coming together yes absolutely i think i also work with m b a and executive m b a students so you get the emerging leader who's maybe you've had it a few years in the workplace but they're looking and they're really forming their leadership identity and that becomes really important that's why i think it's it's great when these new leaders are beginning this conversation because that's the time to start thinking about it right not maybe thirty years in after all the habits are formed but in the beginning and then with the e m b a students they've had several years in the workplace and perhaps they're entering into this conversation and even some of them this is a you know thinking about leadership and who they want to be is new so getting blurred too because when i say i'm like i love working with emerging leaders but also ones who are entering into different leadership roles that can be within the organization but now with our giga kadhimiya people jumping careers  industries people are getting put in these positions where they have to rethink and re frame their leadership context and they're the assumptions in the rules that they've been playing by right so things are changing and the global environment of how they're working and everything they really almost almost would be better if they wipe the slate clean and and had a context to think about it so i think when when my clients are facing that they you know we are able to identify those barriers and to you know clear the way for for what success looks like for them and to help them define what that looks like in the context that's great when other pieces from my background is i've done a little bit of on stage performance of my background i have some of that my background i have a  music degree so i found that that actually plays really well into the communication side of my coaching and helping people to find what their quote unquote executive presence is so work with people with their voice with their how they appear how they hold themselves and how they show up in meetings and that type of thing so those are just a few of the things that i work with people and it's so fascinating to hear the different frameworks have worth thinking about that dance  so if you look back to the old socio linguistic literature right the sociology of communication the metaphor was always dance and the all the code switching work of the anthropology folks  also about being able to in a cross cultural context do code switching more movement between one frame of reference one set of nonverbal behaviors to another and you can get at it in so many  absolutely and i think that's a great example about how the work around diversity and inclusion benefits all because what it has is shined a light on the ways in which all of us har in context outside of let's say going to another country and it's interesting that we're talking about this and diversity and inclusion and global's skill sets because that i think that's something that we all whole are doing in our practices and actually i have a book called flex which builds on the idea of dance it doesn't you know get our books together and i don't know what it's about dyslexia it's about this idea of code switching that i have a set of assumptions and behaviors that i've been working on from even definitions of what success looks like or what the right way of doing something is and you might have a completely different set that actually manifests itself as an opposite behavior said so a good example is  contact in some cultures i contact is very disrespectful or actually what it says is the same as you so you wouldn't do that with somebody in authority but here in the states in the western cultures i contact actually means respect so it's actually just the opposite thing so you see how you have to flex your behaviors depending on the context so that we can dance and communicate and so i think that is very very very something that we all have in our practice and one of the things people never think about is why musicians are so good sometimes that interpersonal interaction and it's the rhythmic synchrony and their ability to change with different rhythms of culture and there's also the challenges around how what is respect like you had a boundary is like my yes ladies we are out of time but i want to have you all back so we can continue this fabulous conversation thank you thank you thank you