Get Serious About Leadership

Today, leaders are being asked to make unfathomable choices in an unstable environment.

At Sounding Board, the leaders we coach have had the benefit of massive amounts of practice. Because they are constantly dealing with change – acquisitions, bankruptcy, layoffs, massive hiring, downsizing, changing strategic direction, IPOs – these leaders have had to lean into change management skills to mitigate the ever-shifting impact on staff and outcomes. To the leaders of the companies we coach, while the new global pandemic adds intensity and a brand new unknown, this is the kind of change management they have been honing their skills for all along.

As a leader, you have probably been facing challenges that tested your leadership skills for years. Letting staff members go, rearranging budgets, making hard choices, holding firm to an unpopular view, managing stress amidst urgency… sound familiar? You are a seasoned leader, I imagine you have had lots of opportunities to lay this critical foundation.

But many leaders have been avoiding cultivating and practicing key leadership skills. When given a choice, they choose other urgent tasks instead of using their time to develop trust with employees and colleagues, think strategically and proactively about business challenges, provide clear direction, correct communications issues, invest in self-management, or tackle a long-overdue courageous conversation about behavior or performance.

With legions working from home and a new urgency developing to deliver business outcomes amid unstable conditions, now is the moment where leaders are made – for real – by doing everything you should have been doing as a leader all along.

Ben Horowitz in his 2011 book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” illuminates how hard it is to become a wartime leader if you haven’t been upleveling your leadership skills in peacetime: “In peacetime, leaders must maximize and broaden the current opportunity. As a result, peacetime leaders employ techniques to encourage broad-based creativity and contribution across a diverse set of possible objectives. In wartime, by contrast, the company typically has a single bullet in the chamber and must, at all costs, hit the target. The company’s survival in wartime depends upon strict adherence and alignment to the mission.”

In today’s environment, we are all being asked to step up to be wartime leaders– to hit that target dead-on. Yet, how do you inspire and motivate employees if you haven’t been cultivating those relationships all along? How do you get employees to “walk through walls” to make things happen now when you haven’t created the trust needed for employees to go all in. How do you even know what the “one bullet in your chamber” is unless you have been considering the future of your business strategically already?

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 that and are now ready to shine in this time of crisis.

But if you are not one of these lucky and proactive leaders, don’t worry. Coaching is the secret weapon that can quickly elevate your leadership and help you get smart about change. Coaching provides a thought partner, trusted confidant, and accountability reminder, and a shock absorber when it comes to making hard decisions and navigating a crisis. Coaching helps leaders decide how to manage themselves and their teams through stress, be strategic in the face of a crisis, and get clear and intentional about communication. Coaching brings curiosity to the table, not fear, helping shed light, and a new perspective on what’s available in any situation.

For example, take two leaders I know. One leader, pre-pandemic, had been saying she wanted to work on some communication issues on her team but she never found the time to make it happen. Suddenly, with a new virtual work-life she finds herself unable to set boundaries with and keep her team motivated and is failing to keep the business running at full steam. On the other hand, a second leader has been patiently and persistently working on trust with her team even when day-to-day struggles hit her unit, incrementally shifting her mindset so she can better empower her team to do the problem-solving. While there are ups and downs, she is finding herself energized by our current moment and her team is ready and willing to meet the challenge head-on.

Both approaches are understandable, but only one will result in a thriving, successful environment to deliver business outcomes and adapt to today’s new normal. For these leaders, crisis creates opportunity, and the more adaptive, responsive and agile the leader can be at mastering leadership skills, the more successful they will be at moving quickly through any challenge.

If you’re finding yourself less than adaptive in this moment, my encouragement to you is to go back to basics. Take a look at the things you should have been doing all along, the hard tasks that you know you need to tackle, and decide the moment is now. You will find that the resistance can be an indicator of where you need to practice, sharpen, and engage skills that will make you a better leader, whatever the circumstances to come. And use a coach to help you quickly level up your wartime leaders skills faster than you can do on your own. You may just find yourself as excited and prepared for a cycle of massive change as you are for the profitable times that hopefully lie beyond it.

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Sounding Board offers virtual and scalable enterprise learning solutions that are flexible enough to adapt to rapidly changing work environments. Powered by behavioral science and core leadership capabilities, our proven coaching methodology drives measurable business impact.

Niall MacGearailt

SVP of Finance
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.

Ron Buell

VP of Engineering
Ron Buell is the VP of Engineering at Sounding Board and an accomplished software professional with extensive experience in leadership, software engineering, project management, and product management. Ron has led the development of highly scalable systems and applications across a variety of technologies for companies including OpenFeint (acquired by GREE), Rdio (acquired by Pandora), Lyris Technologies, and Lotus/IBM Software Group. In his role at Sounding Board, Buell is responsible for all engineering efforts in developing, deploying, and maintaining the enterprise software platform and team for the company.

Tommy Perkins

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.