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!  

We recently celebrated our 4th installment of the Jackalope Sessions.  A unique networking collaboration between Irontree Consulting, Butchershop Creative, and Knock 2x.  This was our largest turnout yet, and far and away our most intriguing and diverse crowd. 

Our goal is to create a re-engineered meet-up, with people from a variety of backgrounds and professional industries bringing great energy to a fun evening.  We think we achieved this last week, and we’ve heard similar feedback from those of you with whom we’ve spoken since Tuesday night.

Please support us by picking up a super-soft Jackalope t-shirt. Not only do you get a sweet design on a super-soft shirt, but you’ll be supporting our efforts to put the Jackalope Sessions together.

Pictures of the most recent event can be found on Facebook and please tag yourself if your made the cut. We love to see faces to names.  Read the Market Wire press release to learn more - http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/butchershop-creative-sparks-conversation-once-again-with-jackalope-session-4-1626458.htm.

The Department of State, NASA, USAID, and NIKE joined together to form LAUNCH in an effort to identify, showcase and support innovative approaches to global challenges through a series of forums.  Our strategic partners at Cazneau Group invited us to participate and we're very thankful for the opportunity.  Launch is a global initiative to identify and support the innovative work poised to contribute to a sustainable future and accelerate solutions to meet urgent challenges facing our society.  LAUNCH searches for visionaries, whose world-class ideas, technologies or programs show great promise for making tangible impacts on society. 

LAUNCH's current initiative is "Beyond Waste."  The goal of the Beyond Waste Challenge is to identify ten “game changing” innovations that have the potential to transform the current waste management systems and practices to ones focused on minimizing waste and/or transforming waste into new products.  It's an incredible opportunity for innovators to bring their products/services to life, as well as to make a HUGE impact.  To learn more about LAUNCH, the Beyond Waste Challenge, or any of their past initiatives please visit http://launch.org/.

Irontree Consulting, Butchershop Creative, and Knock Twice threw their 5th installment of the Jackalope Sessions on April 19th.  It again solidified that our efforts in attempting to create unique environments for people to connect, chat, learn, share, grow, develop, drive business, innovate, create, and inspire truly adds value to the community.  We will continue to explore new and exciting ways to bring interesting people to the event, and are always open to feedback.  

I also wanted to share one attendee's take on the JS5. Bay Area local Aaron Lewis finds a creative, poetic, and refreshing take on presenting the news in San Francisco.  Check out the blog at Current Events Poems.  Enjoy!

Friends,

This isn’t strictly a news story, but it is a current event in the universe of this very website.  Tonight I will be attending the fifth of ButcherShop Creative’s “Jackalope” meet-up sessions.  Current Event Poems was recently featured on their blog.

They are an amazing group of fearlessly imaginative people, and I find my creativity sparked when I spend time in their midst.  Since one my goals for this website is to inspire creativity in others and encourage appreciation of the nuances of the Bay Area, I wanted to mention them.  They are a good kind of nuance, not a drive-your-car-into-the-ocean or a kill-and-eat-housecats kind of nuance.

A mishmash, the jackalope brings,

Many heretofore unknown things.

Sweet taste of solved mystery,

Last line of your untold story.

 
How can this silly creature be?

From human mind it sprang with glee.

To stand for sparks and tinder dry,

For all we boldly dare to try.

 
Animal metaphorical,

The innovating oracle.

With creator’s knowledge imbued,

With perfect sight, the future viewed.

 
Antlers and hind legs sprinting,

Juxtaposed pelts, sinews – thinking.

A mind with hope and heart with blood,

Idle moments with promise flood.

 
Go forth now!  In bright grasses play,

Under wet skies, pregnant and gray.

Fill the plains with unbounded fight,

The earth receives creative might.