Personalized leadership coaching for a profound professional transformation

Sounding Board is changing leadership development with our tech-driven approach that delivers high-impact, 1:1 personalized development at all levels – from your frontline managers to your senior executives.

Find a Coach

Leadership isn’t a one size fits all approach

That’s where Sounding Board comes in. Research has shown that coaching is one of the most effective training modalities, yet it has been one of the least-used due to cost and lack of scalability. Our coaching is customized to each of your leaders with coach curated content supplementing individual sessions.

Maximize for measurable business outcomes.

Personalized leadership development for every individual, scalable and customized to their specific leadership needs.

Coaching is a highly personalized form of professional leadership development, with an action-oriented approach. Coaches partner with employees to increase self-awareness and generate insights that can lead to lasting mindset shifts and behavior change shifts.

Coaches may use a combination of questions, tools, frameworks and content to personalize the learning experience for each employee.

Best-in-class coaches and cutting edge technology deliver high-quality, high impact leadership development.

Sounding Board delivers valuable learning to the employee AND the company through our global network of leadership coaches and technology.

We don’t just take any coach. Our coaches go through a vigorous 3-step vetting process, that includes a live coaching session to demonstrate their coaching skills. They are required to have the highest level of professional leadership coach certification, 10+ years of experience, background in organizational learning/psychology, and real-world leadership, operational expertise, and experience at companies like Genentech, Google and Lyft, to name a few.

We walk the talk: Sounding Board invests heavily in the continuous development of our coaches.

The Sounding Board coaches attend regular trainings at the exclusive Sounding Board University to assure that their learning keeps them at the top of their game.

The coaches are also supported by a virtual community which provides a sharing of information and insights. We exercise our commitment to development every day, and it’s a great model for success…our coach retention rate is 92%. That means that you’re not going to be switching out coaches in mid-stream through an engagement. Our own investment in Leadership Development is core to why we are able to offer our clients the highest caliber of coaches in the industry who provide consistent quality coaching across all tiers of leadership.

The Sound Coaching Methodology^TM

Corporate Assessment

We start by analyzing your corporate vision, values, culture, structure and more to gain a deep understanding of how a leadership development program can help meet your goals.

Algorithmic Matching

Next we help identify the right leaders for enrollment, aligning each individual to their ideal coach using a 6-point matching system based on cultural fit, functional area, management level, experience, social style and our proprietary matching algorithms.

Identify Patterns

We work with leaders to identify the thought patterns underlying their behavior, then we develop a personalized plan to help leaders shift their mindset and establish new behavior patterns.

Transform Mindset

Our coaches work closely with leaders to refine and naturalize new mindsets through bi-weekly, 1:1 virtual coaching sessions and continuous interactions via email, chat, Slack and more.

Measure Progress

Track progress in real-time using advanced analytics and data gathered through reports, surveys, ratings, journal entries and more.

Optimize Results

We incorporate key learnings from our analytics model to create a continuous feedback loop that drives individual progress and corporate ROI.

Get to Know Some of Our Coaches

Sounding Board delivers valuable learning to the employee AND the company through our global network of leadership coaches and technology. Our coaches go through a vigorous vetting process. Not only are they required to have real-world leadership expertise, but have the highest level of professional leadership coach certification.

A lot of happy clients!

Sounding Board thrives on our clients success and we are proud to share some of their experiences. We are honored to be part of their learning and development, as we work to impact business outcomes through strong leaders.

Not just logos, companies who trust us

Join our coaching team

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.

Learn how to create a coaching program that scales from managers to executives

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.

Personalized leadership coaching for a profound professional transformation

Leadership isn’t a one size fits all approach

Maximize for measurable business outcomes.

Best-in-class coaches and cutting edge technology deliver high-quality, high impact leadership development.

Sounding Board delivers valuable learning to the employee AND the company through our global network of leadership coaches and technology.

We walk the talk: Sounding Board invests heavily in the continuous development of our coaches.