Many business owners and CEOs appreciate and understand the value of working with an experienced CEO coach, but what about the impact an executive coach can have on your management team?
This is Part 3 of our case study interview with John Maier, President and CEO of Blue Microphones.
In this video, John speaks openly about working with CEO Coach and strategic planning facilitator Brian Oken – how it’s helped his management team work on structure and organizational issues, and also how it’s helped them think through critical decisions more effectively.
Here’s the rest of the interview:
Why did you reach out to The Oken Company? (Part 1)
Strategic Planning Results and Benefits – Blue Microphones (Part 2)
How Does Working With a CEO Coach Help You as a Leader? (Part 4)
Why Hire an Outside Business Consultant? (Part 5)
Transcript:.
How much interaction has Brian had with your management team? How did they feel about working with an executive coach? How does he challenge them?
We’re actually using Brian for other things now, too. So we don’t just use the consulting offsite retreats and strategy.
When we have certain challenges, we’ve brought Brian in to work with a specific VP in that department to start figuring out some…
We had some team structure issues: How do we set up this team? How should they work together? And Brian helped us through that. So yeah, he has communication with the rest of the team.
And I think that’s another interesting point about having this kind of outside consultant come in. You tend to get a lot of eye rolling. The VP’s go, “Yeah, great… another consultant. Just what we need.”
What’s been great about Brian’s approach is, he’s won their trust over time by, again, listening, and asking the right questions, and then offering up the right kind of help as opposed to just the pat answers that a lot of textbooks, and again, consultants can give you.
So the rapport’s been great. And the guys get push back, too.
That’s another thing I’ll say is, Brian is not afraid to question your thought processes. He’s not afraid to push you a little bit and go, “I’m not going to let you off the hook that easily. You’ve got to think about this.”
And once you’ve gained someone’s trust, you can get away with that, and it actually works, and that’s what Brian’s been able to do.