Coach Me! Your Personal Board of Directors

15 “The Payoff from Listening”

Frank Wagner

Frank Wagner as a behavioral coach, Frank brings a broad base of experience working with individuals from mid-level management through C-level positions. Frank’s specialty is leadership behavior, with an emphasis on commitment, teamwork, influence across organizational boundaries, and talent development.

This story starts with an organization going through a massive transformation where they were reinventing how they did business. This transformation was due to the work the senior team had gone through to reimagine how they would match a new future picture based on a view that their industry was changing radically.

Every process, and every person, was looked at from the perspective of alignment with their new future picture. The leader chosen to head Sales for the entire country was promoted two levels from where he was before the change. Gabriel was relatively young and deemed the best choice to lead the sales organization into the future.

As part of this promotion, he was assigned a coach to help him in his first year. The external consultant who was working with the top management in the creation of their future picture, and the needed future conduct of their leadership, recommended me to be the coach to this new country sales executive.

In my initial meeting with Gabriel, I described the process we would be using to help him succeed in his new role. Toward the end of our first meeting, I asked him, “What is the most important ...