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From online learning to “always on” platforms, learn from Leadership & Development Leader Naphtali Bryant and Sounding Board’s Christine Tao what top HR and Leadership approaches will now become the ‘new’ standard

Learning and the new future of work

Leading Remotely: Candor from Sounding Board’s Leadership Coaches

Leading Forward: How Coaching Turns Learning into Impact

Hard Times Call for Soft Skills

Introducing Leadership Labs Group Coaching

Lead Forward: It’s Not One Size Fits All

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The HR experts and coaches at Sounding Board write, film and create the most informative content each week to help you with the most critical topics. Join and learn more about how we help create great leaders.

Podcast - Drive Your Career: Christine Tao

Charu Sharma, host of "Drive Your Career" podcast recently interviewed Sounding Board's Co-founder & CEO Christine Tao about her story of starting her VC-backed company while pregnant with her second…

Leading Forward: Top Insights for Leveraging L&D as a Catalyst for Change

On Tuesday, July 28, 2020 top learning leaders Alisa Lewis, VP of HR - Bill.com, Janice Burns, Chief Career Experience Officer, Degreed and Kathleen Kirkish, Coach at Leadership Reimagined &…

Featured in New York Post - Sounding Board's Christine Tao shares insight on how finding a good mentor is actually all about coaching

Until recently, only top managers were paired with an executive coach. Sessions were almost always in person, often required travel and cost thousands of dollars. At progressive companies, this has…

Time to Get Serious About Leadership

The work of leaders in peacetime is to be as prepared as possible for wartime, not just their business but themselves. Leaders participating in Sounding Board coaching have been doing…

Meet Barry Peterson, Sounding Board’s new Director of Engineering!

Sounding Board is excited to welcome Barry Peterson as Director of Engineering. Barry brings over 18 years of hands-on engineering expertise and thought leadership to the team.

5 Strategies for Setting Intentions and Visioning

The following are five reasons why setting intentions and visualizing are the most powerful tool you can engage with as we all emerge from quarantine.

COVID-19 Pandemic Pushes Leaders to Evolve Faster and Be Better

What the COVID-19 pandemic has done is expedite this revelation, exposing the default mental habits of many and, in some cases, accelerating the leadership that might have taken months or…

What got us here won’t get us there

My first coach was hired for me before I knew anything about coaching. Because I was constantly upsetting the status quo, my bosses couldn’t figure out what to do with…

In honor of International Coaching Day

In honor of International Coaching Day (part of International Coaching Week May 4-10) Sounding Board salutes the integral role that coaches play in the future of work. We thank the…

Turn Lemons into Lemonade

How are people feeling this morning? The best way to describe my emotional state and what I've observed of others has been what I've now coined "the cry-laugh". For so…

Accepting Help During a Pandemic

As we are all still sheltering-in-place at Sounding Board and working remotely like the majority of the country, the time has given way to team members who are sharing their…

The Cycle of a Pandemic: An opportunity for leaders

The cycle of a pandemic - for most of us something we have never experienced - will have devastating effects on our country and our communities for years to come.…

Jamie Dimon Walks the Talk: Leadership Development

Jamie Dimon is considered one of the best CEO’s of our time. My guess is that he is walking this talk. 20 years ago when the coaching industry was just…

Resourcing Yourself First Makes You a Better Leader

What is radical about resourcing yourself first? Radical self-resourcing demands that you relentlessly do what it takes to ensure that you are showing up at your best – be it…

Christine Tao talks about "Building an Agile & Innovative HR Function for startups" with Hacking HR Global Online Conference and Workshop

Hear from people leaders that have seen companies and unicorns through hypergrowth across every industry: consumer, B2B, Saas, media and gaming. Our panelists have all led the HR function at…

Christine Tao on the BearStartups Podcast

The BearStartups is a podcast hosted by Michael Assadi where he interviews highly successful UC Berkeley alumni & student entrepreneurs on their story, advice, and ultimately how they turned their…

Breaking Out of Your Personal Jail: How to Get the Freedom You Crave

When I first started working, I was terrible about setting boundaries. I would work constantly, logging hour after hour to please insatiable bosses. I was convinced that the longer and…

The 4 New Year’s Resolutions to Strengthen Your Company’s Leadership Culture

The champagne is popped, the ball has dropped, now make some resolutions to empower your leadership teams in the new year.

How HR can Help Turn Managers into Strategic Leaders (Part 2: Challenges of a First Time Manager)

The transition into a managerial role for the first time is a tough one. Often times, first time managers experience many of the same challenges. During the fireside chat Christine,…

How HR can Help Turn Managers into Strategic Leaders (Part 3: Tips to be more Strategic!)

Our last two posts gave a recap and summary of some of the topics discussed during the chat along with some tips. In this post, however, we hope to provide…

How To Succeed As A New Manager

For many professionals, landing their first job as a new manager seems like the epitome of success. But in my experience, once they get a moment alone in their new…

Event Recap: How Top HR Leaders Partner With The CEO & Board To Drive Business Success

Our own Christine Tao led a Redpoint Ventures panel called Building Your Strategic Leadership Muscle, where HR experts explored the crucial role of Chief People Officers in modern business settings.

Forbes.com: “Modern Leadership Coaching For New Executives: We Wish We Had This Earlier”

What got you promoted, won’t help you now. Blame disruptive cloud technologies stoking the fastest-ever pace of business change. Better yet, unite that technology with executive coaching designed to meet…

Is Your Coach a Trillion Dollar Coach?

Leadership is a difficult skill to master, which makes leadership coaching an art in itself. That’s why we were so excited to find out about Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership…

Three Mindset Shifts To Help New Leaders Excel

I often think of promoting an employee to a new executive or managerial position as what it’s like teaching someone how to drive. The driving student might have spent years…

Soft Skills For First Time Managers In The Digital Age

Soft skills have always been critical to leadership success, but in a modern digital work environment, new managers must recalibrate.

Say the Hard Things

VIDEO - While I’ve built global teams before, I’ve learned that leadership is truly a constantly evolving practice. I guess that’s why leading teams can be so fulfilling and also…

From Our CCO: As a Leader, Step Out of Line

Maybe you have just been promoted to a new position and you don’t want to make a mistake in your first 90 days. Maybe you have a Board to report…

Coaching or Mentoring: Arming Leaders with the Support They Need

My coach asked me powerful questions, waited to hear what I thought the solutions was, then dared me to go out and do that thing, even if it had never…

What is Leadership Coaching? Debunking 3 Common Misconceptions

Leadership coaching is a highly personalized methodology that cultivates leaders and grows companies from the inside out — but it’s not widely understood. It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when coaching…

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From leading remote workforces, building productive teams, to improving diversity, equity, and inclusion, Sounding Board has virtual and scalable enterprise solutions that are urgently required to adapt to rapidly changing workplace environments.

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Our expert coaches combine top notch coaching, business acumen and organizational savvy to truly become your leadership “Sounding Board”. Sounding Board coaches are all industry certified and strongly vetted going through a 3 step qualification process and receiving ongoing supervision and development.

Lori Mazan

Co-Founder & Chief Coaching Officer

Lori Mazan is the Co-Founder and Chief Coaching Officer of Sounding Board, the preeminent global leadership development enterprise platform changing the face of leadership development through innovative technology for leaders at all levels of an organization. Lori is a seasoned executive coach who has guided hundreds of corporate executives through 1:1 coaching focused on business outcomes and developing critical leadership skills. Client companies advanced by Lori’s expertise include Fortune titans such as Chevron and Sprint as well as high growth and public companies like Intellikine, and Tapjoy, plus 10XGenomics, which became a public company in 2019 while top executives worked with Lori and the Sounding Board team.

Lori has spent the last 25 years coaching C-Suite executives to leadership excellence. Many of those public and private company CEO’s expressed that they would have liked this caliber of coaching earlier in their careers. Inspired by these experiences, Lori joined with Christine to launch Sounding Board as a feedback-driven, cloud-based leadership coaching platform that could maintain best-in-class leadership coaching while lowering costs to make it affordable and scalable for leaders at every level of their careers.

Before founding Sounding Board, Lori received her Masters’ in Adult Educational Psychology/Counseling from the University of San Francisco and a Bachelors’ in Psychology from the University of Virginia. Lori is an educator and has spent over 10 years as a professor of social psychology and group dynamics while acting as the interim Dean of Students at Holy Names University, She is certified by the industry’s gold standard, the Coaches Training Institute, and is a founding member of the Genentech Preferred Network of Coaches. Sounding Board is one of <3% of sole female founded startups receiving venture funding. In 2019 Sounding Board was selected as 1 of 7 startups (out of 100+ applicants) as part of SAP’s HR tech cohort, a group that represents the rising stars of the next-gen HR ecosystem.

Christine Tao

Co-Founder & CEO Sounding Board, Inc.

Christine Tao is the co-founder & CEO at Sounding Board, a Silicon Valley startup redefining how organizations are developing their leaders. Her extraordinarily rapid career growth to executive management in the media, mobile and tech sectors of Silicon Valley became her inspiration for founding Sounding Board. As she began to manage larger teams and be responsible for growing revenues, it became clear that she needed a “sounding board” to coach her on the development of her leadership skills. That’s where her Sounding Board co-founder, Lori Mazan came on the scene. A seasoned executive coach focused on leadership development, Lori coached Christine on real-world leadership skills that had a direct impact on business outcomes. Based on her positive and impactful experience with leadership development, Christine was driven to make leadership development coaching accessible to people at all levels of the organization.

Christine advises several startups, is a budding angel investor and is also a Tory Burch Foundation Fellow, a foundation dedicated to investing in the success and sustainability of women entrepreneurs.

Prior to co-founding Sounding Board, Christine was a Senior Vice President of Developer Relations at Tapjoy, a venture-backed, leading mobile advertising & publishing network. She led the growth of Tapjoy’s publisher advertising business from 0 to over $100 million in revenues in less than 3 years. Prior to that she led e-commerce partnerships and strategy at YouTube. Christine holds an MBA in Marketing & Operations from Wharton and a BA in Business Administration from UC Berkeley.