At Sounding Board, Coaches Have Always Been a Priority

Since the very beginning, Sounding Board’s vision was to create a coach-led community and to be more than just a company where coaches could expand their coaching business or pipeline. We wanted to create a place where coaches connect with one another over a shared investment in doing excellent work, and learning and growing with one another. We wanted to be a place where coaches get to work with new customers and leaders and be supported in developing their coaching impact with those customers. We feel proud today – six years later – to say we are still just as invested in these outcomes for our coaches — and for our business.

Our President, Co-Founder and Chief Coaching Officer Lori Mazan had a very clear vision from the start — and an open mind — about how coaches could help influence coaching delivery and business growth to ensure we could scale high quality leadership coaching. We could come to her and say, “This isn’t working.” Or, “We wonder if it could look like this.” She was open to our feedback and used it to grow the business and challenge us in how we were thinking about it too. The same stands true today. 

We find opportunities each week to gather feedback and expertise from our coaches to help us do our work even better. And this relationship goes both ways, as we provide developmental support and feedback to our coaches on their work as well. Given we tend to recruit coaches who are lifelong learners, they are often appreciative of the guidance they receive while working with Sounding Board, and we know their growth helps us grow our quality. I can confidently say that as one of the first three coaches in the company, the feedback I received from our leaders has changed me — and will continue to change me — as a coach, a leader, and a person.

I also appreciate that in working for a company founded by a coach, Lori brings a coaching mentality to how we grow the business. By partnering with coaches to leverage their skills, experience, talents, and backgrounds — we hire coaches who are experienced leaders themselves — we’ve built a company culture where tapping into our coaches’ perspectives actively informs how we scale.

Leadership coaching is Sounding Board’s core business

Our executive leadership team has also come to appreciate the coach’s perspective. In this stage of our organizational growth, it would be easy to just focus on generating revenue. You need to have some leaders who are driven by that. But our company’s leaders are invested in growing high quality leadership coaching, which means thinking about and looking beyond revenue. 

My whole mission in leading the coaching excellence team is to maintain our delivery of the highest quality leadership coaching in the industry — to scale. Some of our competitors seemingly scale overnight. They’ll acquire thousands of coaches, but it makes me wonder: How do they know what all of those coaches are doing with their customers? Daily we are focused on growing coaches who grow leaders. We are thinking about how we maintain fidelity to our brand promise to grow the world’s most impactful leaders, and what quality assurance efforts we can scale to help ensure that quality. 

To provide a return on investment to our customers, our brand promise is to not only develop leaders and their leadership capabilities, but to expand those leaders’ abilities to have a greater impact on their organization’s desired results. Given we provide corporate sponsored leadership coaching, we expect our coaches to coach leaders and executives in the context of their organizational environment. As a result, we see different outcomes than if you’re coaching an individual through a privately sponsored coaching engagement.

Some things change, others stay the same

In Sounding Board’s early days, it was really grassroots. It was our coaches and our co-founders, and the coaches were the only ones who got paid. But we were all here because we believed in Sounding Board’s mission. We all wanted to be a part of scaling really good leadership coaching, and we all wanted to be in a community with others who wanted this too.

In this industry, the vast majority of coaches are their own island, working independently and relying on themselves to manage all aspects of their work and its quality. I’ve been an internal coach within organizations. I’ve been an external coach. And I’ve developed internal and external coaching programs. In my opinion, by far the most successful coaching happens when you have a group of people who do the same thing for or with an organization, and can connect with one another for feedback and for growing their coaching practice.

As coaches, we are our own instruments. To be an effective coach, you have to be willing to learn new things and stretch your range because the more you do that, the more you help the leaders you coach do that. I have no doubt that creating a true learning community amongst the coaches at Sounding Board, learning from and with each other, is what continues to elevate our coaches and our coaching.

That hasn’t changed since day one. The commitment to maintaining that has had to evolve as Sounding Board grows, but we truly want people here who want to be in a community, partnering through learning to scale themselves as coaches. That’s who we try to find and recruit in as coaches, and I think that’s a significant reason why our customers consistently report that the quality of our leadership coaching is so high.

At Sounding Board, coaches are truly valued

We recognize that a big part of how we have gotten to this point in our company’s growth is because of the quality and commitment of the coaches who deliver our services. We strive to consistently demonstrate to our coaches how much they mean to us. Whether we are: maintaining a coach rate higher than the International Coach Federation’s global rate, paying our coaches for their time even when sessions might be canceled, finding unique ways to celebrate and recognize their contributions to the company and to our community, it all matters, and we hope our coaches would say so too. 

Lauren Morley Hutto, CPCC, PCC, is the Senior Director, Coaching Excellence and a certified leadership and executive coach for Sounding Board Inc.

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Niall MacGearailt

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Niall MacGearailt leads Sounding Board’s finance division as the SVP of Finance and Operations. Niall earned a solid track record of improving P&L and operational expense management for leading companies such as Whirlpool, Logitech, Avaya and most recently Soraa, where he prepared the business for acquisition by leading hi-tech lighting company, Ecosense. In his role, he is responsible for building and leading the finance & relevant operations functions for the company.

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SVP OF SALES, PARTNERSHIP & CUSTOMER SUCCESS

Tommy is at his best helping clients think through complex challenges in order to create a positive impact on their organizations. He thrives when interacting with others whether helping his team succeed or working with clients to build long-term partnerships. He has extensive experience consulting with organizations on driving their employee experience, guiding organizations through change, and working to ensure organizations are moving the needle when it comes to their results.

Most recently, Tommy was a Client Services Leader overseeing some of GP’s most prized accounts on a global level. His responsibilities included overall client growth strategy, retention, and satisfaction. He represented all of GP Strategies’ major business lines including leadership, coaching, and engagement, digital transformation, outsourced services, and technology implementation solutions.

Before GP Strategies, Tommy spent several years with TTEC Digital (formerly rogenSI) where he led the sales team,  eventually becoming the regional Learning & Performance practice leader for North America. While managing the P&L and sales team he also led the largest global relationship for the firm (Deloitte Globally). During his time at TTEC, he focused on delivering blended learning solutions that incorporate technology and hands-on training. Before TTEC Digital, he spent several years dedicated to strength-based leadership disrupting the business landscape regarding performance management and employee engagement with thought leader Marcus Buckingham at The Marcus Buckingham Company / TMBC (now ADP).

Tommy has had the privilege of working with some of the most well-known global brands in professional services, retail, technology, and healthcare including Deloitte, Facebook, Microsoft, Bank of America, Novartis, Gap Inc., lululemon, and Intel. Several projects he led for Deloitte were Global GNPS, New Partner Pivot, NextGen Partner Program Deloitte China, Present to Win, the RPM project on performance management, and Unconscious Bias.

Tommy holds a BS in Health Sciences from Texas A&M University, and an MBA from Universidad del CEMA.

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Lori Mazan

Co-Founder & CCO Sounding Board, Inc.
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.