The Value of Leadership Coaching Amid Turbulence and Disruption

Leadership coaching is a proven leadership development tool, and even a little bit of certainty is welcome in the turbulent times we’re currently living and working in. It’s not just the challenges associated with continuous change and market disruption. Leaders must contend with the threat of violence, mental, physical, and emotional demands on talent as well as changing expectations around work itself. The pressure is heavy and constant, and it doesn’t even touch the demands that ambitious people place on themselves amid these unusually stimulating environs.

Now is not the time to hide, or float, or hope for the best. It’s a time to be intentional about development, for yourself and for your team. Leaders cannot give themselves a free pass. They need new behaviors, new mindsets, new innovations to meet the challenges inherent in the modern workplace. To develop these, they have to build a continuous learning mindset. It’s one of the best ways to ensure that working amid disruption isn’t quite so hard or devoid of connection, and is not without benefit, advancement, and purpose.

In this webcast Sounding Board’s CEO and Co-founder, Christine Tao and Ancestry.com’s President and CEO, Deb Liu discuss:

  • Why talent leaders should invest in leadership coaching as a critical tool to enhance the employee experience at all levels
  • The value of this particular leadership development strategy for an individual and for an organization 
  • What could happen if leaders don’t make leadership development a priority in the short- and long-term.

Presenters

The Value of Leadership Coaching Amid Turbulence and Disruption 1

Christine Tao

Co-founder and CEO, Sounding Board

Christine Tao is the co-founder and CEO for Sounding Board, the first Leader Development Platform designed to bridge the leadership gap. She has enjoyed several roles in Silicon Valley at Google and YouTube, but her inspiration to launch Sounding Board began while she worked at TapJoy, a leading, venture-backed mobile advertising and publishing network. As Senior Vice President of Developer Relations, she led growth for Tapjoy’s publisher advertising business from zero to more than $100 million in revenues in less than three years. While at the company, she was promoted several times, and it brought to light a need for leadership development. To aid her career transitions, the company gave her a leadership coach, Lori Mazan, who eventually became her Sounding Board co-founder.

In addition to advising several startups, Christine is an angel investor and a fellow at the Tory Burch Foundation, a foundation dedicated to investing in women entrepreneurs’ success and sustainability. She was named to the EY Winning Women Class of 2021, and won the 2021 Stevie Awards for Women in Business. Committed to mentoring and supporting other underrepresented founders, Christine spoke at the 2021 Haas Women in Leadership Summit, Xoogler Women’s Network, Leanin, Tory Burch Fellows #EmbraceAmbition and All Raise. She also regularly takes time to meet with founders – often women and POC – to help with their fundraising efforts, and provide any support they need to develop their business.

The Value of Leadership Coaching Amid Turbulence and Disruption 2

Deb Liu

President and CEO, Ancestry

Deb Liu is the President and CEO of Ancestry. With more than 19 years in the tech industry, she has been named one of Business Insider’s most powerful female engineers and one of PaymentsSource’s most influential women in payments. She was previously a senior executive at Facebook, where she created and led Facebook Marketplace, a platform for millions of people to buy from and sell to one another. She also led the development for Facebook’s first mobile ad product for apps and its mobile ad network, in addition to building the company’s games business and payments platform, which includes Facebook Pay. Prior to Facebook, she spent several years in product roles at PayPal and eBay, where she led integration between the two products. She serves on the board for Intuit and Ancestry and is a seed investor and advisor for several startups. She also holds several payments- and commerce-related patents. 

Actively involved in promoting diversity in tech, Deb founded Women In Product, a nonprofit with more than 30,000 members, with the goal to connect and support women in the product management field. She is a member of the Committee of 100, a group of prominent Chinese Americans, and was named an A100 by Gold House, an honor recognizing impactful Asian Americans.

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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.