Thanks to our friend and colleague Jeff Hamaoui for inviting us to the LAUNCH event.  There were over 30 highly intelligent and extremely passionate professionals representing the likes of NASA, The Goodwill, the State Dept, Univ. of California, Nike, USAID, San Diego Zoo, the City of San Francisco, and many others...

The focus of the conversation was waste.  What exactly is waste?...What can we do about it?...And how do we begin fixing the current environmental, economic, and social problems associated with waste?  All of this and more was covered in an intense, yet enlightening 4 hour meeting.  The goal was to collaboratively identify areas of focus and to begin locating and/or creating solutions and products to advance our understanding and ability to deal with waste. 

One of the participants was Beth Beck, who is a political scientist that has been working for NASA for over 25 years.  She has a great blog you can follow at Bethbeck's Blog or via Twitter @bethbeck.  Her latest entry is on Culture of Collaboration.  She does an excellent job of identifying opportunities and barriers to collaboration in a fun and interesting way.  Check it out!

Ongig founder Rob Kelly interviews Irontree President Regan Bach regarding the current trends, challenges, and strengths of executive coaching.  Regan shares the Top 4 most frequent issues/challenges he faces with clients (see below), plus lots of other fun stuff!  Full interview here. 

Here’s a Quick Hit Top 4 list:

1) Vision/Strategy/Execution

Whether it be for CEOs or new managers, setting a clear vision for yourself and your team is mission critical.  From there it’s all about articulating that vision to others, identifying an “actionable” strategy to execute on the vision, mitigating roadblocks, and tweaking the roadmap/trajectory given internal and external inputs over time.

I help leaders to a) get very clear on strengths and areas of opportunity to improve and b) articulate personal/team/company vision, and c) help identify action steps to begin executing on a trajectory for success.

2) Going Slow to Go Fast

In today’s fast pace work environments, leaders jump from task to task, project to project, and large-scale initiative to initiative.  Rarely do they take time to slow down, unplug, assess the Big Picture, and reflect on what’s working, what’s not working, and what they want to do DIFFERENT moving forward.

I act as a forcing function to help support leaders in unplugging, assessing themselves and their environments, and then identifying areas that need their attention.  What’s critical is helping today’s leaders not only identify where to show up, but also how to show up.

3) Influencing

This is an area where almost everyone can improve.  I have found that individuals, regardless of title, greatly underestimate (and thus under-utilize), their ability to influence others.

I spend a great deal of time working with clients to help identify effective and efficient ways to influence both vertically and horizontally throughout an organization.

4) Feedback/Communication and Relationship-Building

As I mentioned earlier, organizations exist because humans create them.  Thus, many leaders continually struggle and are challenged by behavioral and/or human-centric issues.

At the core, it’s all about communication and relationships.  I help leaders create clear lines of communication, implement durable feedback loops into their work, and get clear on how and when they message things to others.

Whew. The day has finally arrived.  Irontree has held off on launching an official website for years now.  Truth be told, until recently, we didn't feel that it was necessary to have a website when 99.9% of our consulting and coaching leads come from past clients and word of mouth.  We told ourselves that we were simply busy getting "real work" done.  Yet in an era when the first thing a potential client does is keyword search your name, it became increasingly clear that it was time for us to claim our virtual presence.  It wasn't easy, but what worth doing ever is?

One can learn a great deal about themselves and their business when forced to create, design, and launch a website.  Who exactly are we?  What is it that we really do?  What do we want the world to know about us?  These are questions that are more difficult to answer than one would think.  On the surface, it's easy.  We are coaches.  We are consultants.  We help people and businesses help themselves.  Yes...these statements are all true, but HOW exactly do we help people?  What makes Irontree Consulting unique?  Why would a client choose us over Company ABC?  These are the tougher questions to answer; yet also the questions that need to be answered. 

The launch of your company website is sort of like becoming a parent...you'll never know how hard it truly is until you've been through it yourself.  For everyone who's braved the trenches of launching a website and made it out the other end alive...we applaud you!  And with that said...here we are.  Tired and battle hardened from the long nights of website wasteland, yet more optimistic than ever about the future!  Thanks for the ongoing support and we truly look forward to continuing to serve our amazing clients.

PS - special thanks to the crew at Butchershop Creative for helping bring our vision to life!