Coach Me! Your Personal Board of Directors

19 Coaching for Conflict Management

Gary Wang

Based in Shanghai, Gary Wang is the founder and CEO of MindSpan, the market leader in executive coaching in China. With over 400 coaches, MindSpan serves 450+ global and local clients in 19 countries, including 136 Fortune 500 companies. Prior to MindSpan, Gary was a senior executive with DuPont and Sony.

Though still a fairly young industry with only about 12 years in existence, executive coaching is gaining increasing popularity in China, driven mainly by leading multinational companies with a serious presence in the country. A number of factors have been fueling the growing demand, including fast-growing businesses, terrifyingly low workplace engagement facing most organizations, shortage of qualified leaders, the conventional and dominant command-and-control leadership style (deeply rooted in Chinese culture), competing coach certification programs and positive experience companies have already gained from their coaching experiences. Due to rapid economic growth that calls for a solid leadership pipeline and strong bench strength, China is today home to some of the most stunning success stories for coaching interventions, and coaching-induced transformations on both team and organizational levels have been great marketing for the coaching profession, and we are never short of such inspiring success narratives. I am very happy to share such a case on the power of coaching, especially in trust and relationship-building context. ...