What Our Clients Are Saying

CLIENT: New CEO of 20-year Company Founded by Father

THE NEED: Client came to Loretta 6-months after becoming President of the company his father built and controlled for more than 20 years.  The client’s formal education was in Social Work, and he had been a therapeutic counselor before joining his father’s business and serving as a VP for several years.  After his father handed him the reins and took a smaller role, the client was suffering from Imposter Syndrome, hampered by his belief that he was not a businessperson or leader and “did not know how CEOs ran companies.” Plus, the client wanted to do things differently than his father, but was struggling to determine his own role, versus the person he had just named to be the VP and ‘second in command’.

RESULT: Loretta first conducted a 360-degree feedback assessment to get a benchmark on what the client’s staff and colleagues believed to be his strengths and areas where he could improve his effectiveness. This was followed by clear objectives and actions for focusing his time and energy and for enhancing leadership behaviors and practices that were considered effective.  She also worked with the client and leadership team to establish their vision, mission and values for the ‘new’ established organization. They also created a 3-to-5-year strategic plan for diversifying the business based on current market dynamics and built revenue targets for existing and new products and services.  With the knowledge of where he needed to become a better leader and a vision and plan to grow the company, the client also worked with Loretta to understand the strengths and development opportunities of his leadership bench, allowing him to better delegate to and mentor each one.  With this new leadership and business acumen, client was able to align the skills and talents of his team to meet the needs and goals of the new organization they were building together.

CLIENT:  CTO and Co-Founder of Fintech Start-Up

THE NEED: The client, an Engineering powerhouse, co-founded a financial technology start-up alongside a seasoned Chief Executive who also served as Chief Commercial officer (Sales) and had strong opinions about how the product should be build.  Client was both the company’s heart and the technological brain-trust who led direct reports in both the engineering and product development areas and partnered with other LT members to align and execute their functional areas.  Client came to Loretta after 4-years in start-up mode because he struggled to please all his stakeholders and run his functions ‘lean and scrappy’. He constantly felt overwhelmed, overworked, undervalued and was in resignation that he could not align his vision for the product with the CEO’s. In addition, English was his second language, so his communication skills, both written and verbal, were always being challenged by his boss and the Board of Directors.

RESULT: Loretta worked with this CTO to help him gain better awareness about how he was showing-up with the CEO, staff and the entire company given his physical and emotional state. She helped him organize his time, recognize the ROI of hiring additional staff that would allow him to move from managing to leading, and held him accountable to breaking old patterns while engaging in new, more effective leadership behaviors.  She also helped him try different approaches to gaining product alignment with the CEO, as well as use tools and frameworks for creating more effective presentations and lead better conversations with the Board.

CLIENT: SVP of Fortune 500 Non-Profit HealthCare Company

THE NEED: Client was the SVP of an internal organization that served as the ‘solutions advisor’ between the business and IT/Development organizations of a large, multi-regional, highly matrixed, and consensus driven healthcare organization.  He was a former CIO of a smaller health plan whose leadership style was to hire ‘independent’ leaders who could execute various functional areas without much assistance from him.  In addition, he was perceived as always being ‘the smartest guy in the room’ and respected in his role for getting things done, yet his team frequently felt like they were ‘on an Island’, and believed the client didn’t really care about developing them.  When they did go to him for assistance, he frequently told them what the answers were and was not accustomed to ‘closing the loop’, expecting them to take care of things on their own.  After some not-so positive employee satisfaction scores, Client came to Loretta to help him build muscle in areas he didn’t particularly enjoy, like focusing on culture and people.

RESULT: Loretta worked with Client to help him establish a regular cadence to his 1:1 and team meetings, with specific agendas and approaches to the conversations, including quarterly meetings focused specifically on talking about development with each of his reports.  She also utilized different psychometric tools with the Client and his leadership team, to help them understand strengths, development areas, better ways to communicate and how to work together more effectively. She encouraged Client to sponsor executive coaching for each of his high-performers, and conducted frequent “Coaching Quads” between Client, DRs and Coaches to align on development opportunities and celebrate successes.  Client learned to advocate for his leaders, gaining promotions to VPs for several. He also sponsored group coaching programs for leaders further down in his organization after recognizing the value of coaching and improved his people and organization satisfaction scores year-after-year.

CLIENT: SVP of (former) Fortune 500 Global Public Internet Media Company

The Need: Client was a brilliant Engineer, responsible for designing and building software products that resulted in hundreds of millions of advertising revenue dollars for this global media internet software company.  He was highly respected and well-liked at all levels of the organization, however his team found him to be a workaholic who sent emails at all hours of the day and night, had unrealistic deadlines for execution, micromanaged the team, and behaved more like a manager rather than a leader.  Although the company had their own cadre of internal coaches, HR felt the client could benefit from working with a Coach who had experience in the C-suite and could help him learn to be a better leader of leaders.

Result: Loretta started with an interview-based 360-degree feedback assessment to get a benchmark on what the client’s staff and colleagues believed to be his strengths and areas where he could improve his effectiveness. The feedback allowed the client to recognize his unproductive patterns and behaviors, and pointed to specific actions he could take to do things differently.  She helped him organize his time and create more effective 1:1 and staff meetings with specific agendas and follow-up actions to track from meeting-to-meeting.  This allowed him to collect the information he needed to ensure timely delivery without bombarding his staff with emails 24/7. She also worked directly with Client’s leadership team to help align their purpose, build trust, clarify their goals and the way they manage implementation of their work, and celebrate their successes. The Client was eventually hired as an EVP at a global Fortune 100 software company with scope and responsibility that surpassed his previous one.