You decide where you’re going.We make sure you arrive.At Tangible, we are proud of each of our client’s accomplishments. We share their stories to illustrate the importance of executive impact. Impact that is reached because they discovered their paths and moved their organizations forward.

TANGIBLE BEGINNINGS

On September 11, 2001, I was a Vice President of Marketing for a venture capital firm, wrapping up a business conference that I had managed for my company in the south of France. At roughly 3pm in France, 9am eastern time, my cell phone rang. My professional life as I had defined it up to that point was about to change. Someone had flown a plane, no wait, make that two planes, into the World Trade Center. I had myself worked in and around these towers at an earlier point in my career. Moving quickly, I tracked down my daughter, back home in Massachusetts. She had just entered her senior year in high school, and I pulled her out of science class. In all my years of travel as a single working mom, we had never had a situation where I simply could not get home. We needed a plan. My fiancé, now husband, Joel Kurtzman, was harder to reach. I knew he should be in his New York City office, safely mid town, but all phone lines were jammed. It was seven hours before Joel finally got through to me on my mobile.

In order to hear him over the din of the restaurant where I had taken my team for dinner and to figure out what to do next, I stepped out on to the street. In spite of the lateness of the hour, tourists swarmed La Croisette and crowded the shops and eateries along this boulevard by the sea as if nothing much was going on. I sat down on the curb to talk. We spoke briefly about the state of the world and the chaos that had us in its grip. After assuring each other that we were safe and my daughter would be cared for; that phone calls to relatives and friends would be placed to check on their safety and confirm ours, we hung up.

I sat for a long while on that curb, staring at the lights of ships floating on dark water some distance out at sea. I thought about what I had seen and heard that day, about the people just like me who had routinely gone off to work and who would not be coming home.

I had always meant to be of service to others in the world. I had taken my first corporate job 27 years earlier in order to buy a new sofa. Nearly three decades and several sofas later, I had begun to ask if I was doing enough to give back. If the world was ending—and it felt like it just might be—this is not where I wanted to be. This is not what I wanted to be doing.

By the end of the year, I had resigned my position as VP of Marketing and enrolled in a year-long coach training certification program. The firm that is now Tangible was launched.

SIX YEARS, SIX LESSONS

This year we celebrate the sixth anniversary of the coaching and consulting firm I started as a result of the decision I made sitting on that curb on a now infamous night in September, watching the ships off the coast of Cannes.

Over the past six years, I’ve learned a lot and met some great people. I remarried, got certified as a coach, and put my daughter through college. I moved from the east coast to the west coast. I worked as a consultant on not one, but two, Hollywood movies. In my first year of business, I called my company “Tangible.” Tangible remains the hallmark of our work. It is at once a promise, a commitment and an outcome.

There is nothing magical about the lessons included here but they do share some key attributes: first, they are all lessons I could have gone either way on until my clients, through their own hard work and persistence, proved them to me. Second, they all had to have a tangible outcome.

Finally, each has a real client story that illustrates the lesson. We include it to inspire and light the way. Each story is authentic; however, to protect the privacy of our clients, we have changed names and some of the details. The outcomes, in all cases, are real.

The “tangible outcomes” described here are each the result of collaboration: at a minimum, between me and my client; but often in concert with one or more coaches, working together to bring about learning and results over time.

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Take care of you.

Put your trust in trust.

Everything is personal.

Intention does not equal impact.

Know what you know.

Think Big(ger).

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mOdELING ThE wAY: Achieving an “impossible” goal.

BACKGROUNd

To qualify for my coaching certification, I had to convince people to let me practice my coaching on them. Since I had been a single mom, and was at the time operating in the stunning wake of the events of 9/11, I wanted to coach women who had become heads of households on that day.

ThE ISSUE

Two problems with this: 1) I did not personally know any moms who had become widows on 9/11; and 2) I was hesitant to inflict my nonexistent coaching skills on women who already had enough problems.

My program director stepped in, advising me to brainstorm a list of possible ways I could resolve this. The list I came up with was predictable, call the usual suspects and ask if they had any leads. Then one day, I was checking out at the grocery store and the cover of People Magazine caught my eye. It featured widows who had given birth in the months following 9/11. I went through the mental gymnastics of talking myself out of pursuing this as a lead, listing all the reasons that this would be a waste of time. A search on the Internet for the editor’s contact information yielded nothing. The email I sent to People generated an impersonal auto-response. But within 2 days, I received a letter inviting me to submit materials that they would forward on to the widows.

TANGIBLE OUTCOmES

Of the 53 letters People sent out from me, I was contacted by 10 women; I was also invited to help start a nonprofit for people affected by the events of that day. I coached 8 widows in single sessions, and 4 for the better part of a year. Often we spoke in the quiet of the night, after the children had gone to bed. We spoke about their finances, their children, their pasts, and eventually, their futures. What if I had edited my goals down to what was “probable?” I can’t imagine.

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1ThE LESSON:Think big(ger).No matter who you are or how successful you’ve been, there are always bigger goals to pursue. We are in the habit of setting small, achievable goals. But it’s just as easy to set “impossible” goals that have massive impact. When you set goals, take a creative leap. Researchers who have conducted longitudinal studies on creativity in humans, observe that infants and children are wildly more creative than their adult counterparts. Evidently, our creativity gets educated out of us for our own protection as time goes by. In coaching we talk a lot about moving beyond our “comfort zone.” One way to do this is to be more intentional about thinking big. What goals can you set now that make a real difference to the largest number of people? What changes lives—yours and others’? Consider a fantastic—as in the word “fantasy”—outcome rather than one that is “right-sized” and manageable. What impossible goals can you move toward? There are some big jobs that need to get done on this planet, in this millennium, right now. Pick one.

Ask yourself: what goal can I set that will have massive impact?

Think of the biggest goal you can and then double its size.

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mOdELING ThE wAY: Leveraging feedback.

BACKGROUNd

David was stalled in the ranks of senior middle management at a high tech company. I was hired by his boss to help get him “to the next level.” He was respected by his team but he was a notorious micro-manager. An engineer by training, he was outspoken about his abilities and “high standards.” He did not always make eye contact when we talked, not because he was shy, but because he was text messaging on his PDA.

ThE ISSUE

Three years before, David had been verbally promoted to VP, pending a meeting with the CEO, which he was told would be a “formality.” However, following that meeting, all talk of a promotion ceased. At the time, David was given a one-word explanation: “attitude.” Three years later, he was still visibly distressed about it. With David’s permission, I went back to his boss. “I underestimated the degree to which arrogance would be a factor for the CEO,” the boss told me. “The truth is David is one of the smartest guys I know. He’s loyal and his work has generated incredible growth for this company. And if people can put up with his style, they don’t just like him, they worship him. But David suffers no fools in silence. The culture’s changing. They’re bringing in more MBAs at the top. David has no time for MBAs.” David needed to know this. If he could find the truth in it for himself, he could choose to adapt his style or march to his own drummer. Either way, he could make peace with the past.

TANGIBLE OUTCOmES

David was coached to listen more and opine less. He turned his PDA off during meetings. He found role models whose style he admired. He met with the CEO quarterly and articulated his strategic vision for the area he oversaw. By the time the year was over, the CEO put David’s name on the list for promotion.

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2ThE LESSON:Know what you know.There are two kinds of people in the world: the kind who believe people are fully baked by the time they reach the workplace and could not change if their very lives depended upon it; and the kind who believe that change is possible, though, let’s face it, not really probable. Do people change? Absolutely. Change can evolve over time; it can happen in a split second. For people to change, only two ingredients are necessary: the truth, and one’s ability to accept the truth. Think about it: once you know something is true, you can’t not know it, no matter how inconvenient. Though in my own corporate career I always dreaded those “360-degree evaluations,” in the end, I already knew what they told me. I just didn’t know I knew it. There is no substitute for a good, objective assessment by one’s bosses, peers and subordinates (and let’s not forget: spouses, children, friends) that raises one’s level of self-awareness and therefore one’s ability to change. It’s one thing if one random person thinks you need to work on yourself. It’s another if everyone thinks it.

what are some ways you can invite feedback? what opportunities for it can you create?

If you receive unwanted feedback, consider it before you reject it. When it’s your turn, look others in the eye and deliver your feedback, kindly and honestly. It is, as they say, a gift.

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mOdELING ThE wAY: Giving up the “busy” habit.

BACKGROUNd

Joan was a lawyer on the partner track at her firm and a working mom with a very full plate. Her days began with dropping her daughters off at school, returning phone calls during her hour-long commute, coordinating her day with her assistant. Days ended with the girls’ homework, a few hours more of email, phone calls to the other moms in her community, and nodding off over whatever pre-reading was required for the next day’s meetings.

ThE ISSUE

“Last week I turned in a report that my boss asked me to prepare 3 weeks ago. When I handed it to her, she laughed. ‘Now I know why this took so long,’ she said. She was expecting a 3-page executive summary; I gave her 50 pages of excruciating detail. I was so busy doing a quality job that I didn’t even stop to ask whether it was what she wanted. I’m busy, busy, busy, but am I accomplishing anything?” Joan had lost her filter for what work would have impact and what work was just work. She set three big goals for herself and broke them down into subtasks, which she calendared. To give her the discipline to lift her head up from whatever she was working on and ask herself whether she was accomplishing something impactful or just intentional, she set an alarm to sound randomly throughout the day.

TANGIBLE OUTCOmES

Within 3 weeks, her boss phoned me to ask what I had done to Joan. “She’s so much more effective. It’s noticeable.” Within 2 months, Joan had achieved one of her top three goals and was well on her way to finishing out an impactful year.

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3ThE LESSON:Intention does not equal impact.It seems obvious to say that intention and impact are not the same thing. After all, the journey is not the same as the destination. The joke is not the same as the punch line. Most people are clear on this concept until it comes to their jobs. That’s because if you are a salaried employee, it’s likely you are rewarded for your intention—for showing up and moving the ball down the field—rather than your impact. If you don’t get the result, you still get paid. If you do get the result, well, you might get a bonus! And when you’re flat-out busy, it becomes easier to confuse intention—“I am working a lot of hours and never take a weekend off”—with impact. “I finished the report, landed the account, cut 20% out of my costs.” There is virtue in intention but only impact results in, well, results. As a consultant, I am closer to the cause and effect of intention and impact. If I commit to deliver a result to my client and in spite of my best effort and hard work I don’t get the result, I don’t get paid.

Interrupt yourself often to ask whether this activity, right now (this conversation, email, plane ride, phone call) is heading toward or away from a desired or expected impact. If not, what can you do to shift priorities?

Find a way to check yourself and recalibrate if need be.

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mOdELING ThE wAY: Aligning values through action.

BACKGROUNd

Lucy is an executive in a $20 billion corporation, where she has worked all of her adult life. I was hired by her company to provide one-on-one coaching as part of a high-potential leadership development program. On the day of our first meeting, she had turned 40. During the previous year, she had lost her best friend in a car accident. I began our coaching session as I usually do, by asking, “What’s the most important thing we can talk about today?” She offered up a few tepid goals and began to explain why she thought her company would want her to pursue them. Among them: she felt she was ready to be a vice president and the company did not seem to see her that way after nearly 20 years of exemplary and certifiably selfless service. I asked: “Are you angry? Are you accepting? I can’t tell.”

ThE ISSUE

Lucy dropped the party-line tone and said, “Look. What is it the company wants from me? I have given them everything I have and it doesn’t seem to be enough. I just buried my best friend. I am not getting any younger. I love working, but I have no social life and I’m 40 years old. I want to get married. I want to have a family. Does the company want to pay you to talk to me about that?” Well, no, but — yes.

TANGIBLE OUTCOmES

We started where Lucy wanted to start. We worked together for more than a year integrating her professional goals with her personal commitments. She began dating a single dad she met on a business trip; they have begun to discuss their future together. And last summer Lucy was promoted by her company to Vice President.

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4ThE LESSON:Everything is personal.People create businesses, work in them, grow them and tank them. If we really behaved as if this were true, ensuring people’s happiness would be all we ever did. And whenever someone hit a rocky patch, we’d help, not punish, the person involved. We are more comfortable diagnosing the “business” dimensions of a problem—the organization, the market, the economy—almost to the exclusion of the personal dimensions. People stuff tends to be messy. Business parameters are more definable. But people, good, bad, and ugly, have exponential impact. If you have ever quit a job because you were unhappy, odds are you quit a person, too. As a coach, my clients will eventually ask if they can talk about the personal side of their lives. But in fact there is no personal “side.” The personal you and the professional you are one you. You cannot separate them any more than you can separate heads from tails on a quarter.

what can you do to remind yourself that inside every professional you deal with lies a consummate personal? what can you do more of to integrate the personal with the professional in a business problem you’re facing right now?

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mOdELING ThE wAY: dialing trust to achieve team impact.

BACKGROUNd

Drew was General Manager for a regional sales team that ranked dead last in sales: 12th out of 12 regions. For a time after the rankings were in, our coaching conversations centered on whether he should just quit and get another job. Then one day he phoned and said, “I’m staying. I have to see how this story ends.”

ThE ISSUE

With feedback, Drew assessed his mistakes and his managers’, had the necessary frank conversations, and set out to hire his dream team. He completely turned over his leadership team and we worked on putting together a series of off sites and coaching conversations designed to get his new leaders working together for the good of the team. They set a goal of moving the region up 8 places, from 12th to 4th place in the country by year end, truly an “impossible” goal. At Drew’s urging, they focused their efforts on dialing in trust: understanding each others’ values, reigning in their own behavioral styles, and meeting each other’s needs. When misfortune befell them, illness struck, customers cancelled, they fought the temptation to throw their fellow team members under the bus. Over the course of a year, they moved from an aggregate of 40 individual contributors to an interdependent team. What happened to one, good or bad, happened to all.

TANGIBLE OUTCOmES

The team came in second in the US, first in their region, and beat their plan by an average of 112%. Two of the team leaders were recognized for their achievements at the company level, worldwide.

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5ThE LESSON:Put your trust in trust.Bookshelves, my own included, are thick with advice and counsel about how to grow businesses bigger, better, and faster. Six Sigma, TQM, tipping points, blue ocean strategies all have their place. But for sheer power and simplicity, I like trust. Think of a team you’ve been part of where the achievement was greater than the sum of any given part. Odds are you went through the stages of building trust in order to reach your goal. When trust among team members is high, it’s like giving everyone a fast car and an open road. When it’s low, when it’s strategized, it’s like throwing sandbags in the fast lane at random intervals. No one is at their best. Proceed with caution! You can intentionally raise your levels of trust in others and theirs in you. Trust responds when you make the effort to understand the values of others, calibrate your style to theirs, and meet their needs.

what can you do to improve levels of trust in a crucial relationship?

Think of values, style and needs as the dials on the dashboard that is trust.

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mOdELING ThE wAY: Building resilience into the day to day.

BACKGROUNd

I met Sam at a 3-day off-site I was facilitating for a group of his peers. He was a great participant who shared that he was the father of 6 adopted children. He never missed a soccer game or a school play, but the demands of his job sometimes conflicted with the needs of his family. He told us this in the cheerful, self-deprecating style of a stand-up comedian, going for the laugh.

ThE ISSUE

On day 2, his manner turned serious. One-on-one, he confided in me that he had not taken a vacation in 3 years and had not been to the doctor’s in 5 years. He said he kept starting and abandoning exercise programs, and knew he needed to eat better. When I pressed for how he could make these things priorities in his life, he said that he was on the road all week long for his job and when he got home, he just wanted to relax with his wife and children. Almost as an afterthought, he told me that his father had died of a heart attack at an unexpectedly young age, the same age that he was now. We set some goals around self-care and resilience and Sam left to join the larger group activity. Two hours later, he was being rushed to the hospital with chest pains. By the time his wife arrived at his side, Sam was in a coma and the doctor’s prognosis was grim. Sam’s wife papered his hospital room with artwork and photos of his children and sat beside his bed telling him how much she and the children needed him as he labored in a coma. After 5 days, he regained consciousness and gradually understood the magnitude of what had happened.

TANGIBLE OUTCOmES

“I am living proof that you have to take care of yourself. In being there for everyone else, I had risked being there for no one.” Sam took his health seriously, lost 28 pounds, and incorporated self-care into his life style. He now shares his story both in his community and at brown-bag seminars at work.

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ThE LESSON:Take care of you.A few years back, I trained for and ran a marathon. Believe me when I say that if could do it, anyone can. The secret is in the training. Our coaches taught us to acclimate our bodies to the pounding distance of the marathon (26.2 miles) by walking for one minute for every 7 or so minutes that we ran. The theory behind this method is that the one minute we walk is like a mini-break for our bodies between the minutes that we spend running. One minute to give your body a breather, let your muscles recuperate, take a drink of water. We were told if we did this during our long distance training runs, and on the day of the marathon itself, our bodies would recover faster from the physical effort. It sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? And yet it worked. On the day after my marathon run I was not even a little bit sore. I hear myself drawing upon the analogy of the one-minute break when clients tell me they don’t have time to eat or exercise, don’t have the staff to work less than a 12-hour day, or just have to put their heads down and plow through the workload for the next several months. The truth is, work sometimes requires you to run a marathon. When it does, give yourself the equivalent of the one-minute break. what would that be for you in your present circumstance? Of course, the best break is to not run the marathon in the first place. how can you be sure your “marathons” are necessary and not the result of poor planning, inability to speak up, or just plain habit? If you cannot find the time to take care of yourself, you risk not being able to take care of others.

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TAKING ONE LAST LOOK

As a coach, I am often engaged in discussions of “return on investment” around what I do. No good coach can take credit for the results of their clients. Coaches are like prisms through which new perspectives may pass. Those new perspectives can have the power to change an individual, a team, or a planet.

As you think about your next 12 months, we hope you’ll be inspired to notice how our six tangible lessons play out in your own lives. And when you come upon your own lessons, we hope you’ll find a way to capture what they mean, not only for yourself but for those around you. And to do that, of course, tangibly.

Since 2002, we have been designing and delivering coaching and consulting services to help Fortune 1000 companies and their executives improve behavior, performance, and visibility at the place where business, leadership and people intersect.

To learn more about Tangible, our faculty, and our products and services, please contact me directly:

Karen warnerTangible Coaching and Consulting

Office: 310-230-2226Mobile: 310-926-9253

Email: karen.warner@tangiblegroup.comwww.tangiblegroup.com

© 2009 Tangible Group and Karen Warner & Associates. All rights reserved.

Design: Amy Detrick, amy.detrick@tangiblegroup.com