IAM1450 – Coach Helps Executive Leaders Solve Business Challenges

Sara Sheehan, PCC, is a consultant and Executive Coach who works with C-Level executive leaders in designing organizations, developing business strategies, managing change, optimizing talent and leadership development, and solving complex human performance problems. Through executive coaching, Sara helps leaders sprint their way up the corporate ladder and increase their performance.

During Sara’s 25+ years in business, she has worked with leaders, teams, and organizations in Fortune 100 companies and individuals. Sara specializes in change management, talent and leadership development, executive coaching, and organization design. As a collaborative, results-orientated coach, Sara provides support and practical feedback to help clients effectively navigate change and address business challenges. She also integrates coaching techniques, methods, and approaches to help her clients develop change capabilities and learn to apply them right away. With a servant leadership mindset, she supports her clients in building new skills and customizes frameworks to her client’s project needs. Sara works with clients based on her network, referrals, and appointments.

Sara has been featured both nationally and internationally on podcasts as an expert on topics of change management, talent and leadership development, executive coaching, and organization design.

• CEO Story: Worked for over 25 years with big consulting firms and Fortune 100 clients. The pandemic has been a big pivot for Sara. Engaging more with her clients whether in consulting or in the executive coaching side of the business. Vaulting into the next opportunity, be it a higher level, bigger purpose, or making a bigger difference.
• Business Service: Consulting, executive coaching, leadership development, organization design. Digital transformation, adopt and adapt.
• Secret Sauce: Help companies to be more people-oriented. Behavior changes. Standing on the shoulders of giants.
• CEO Hack: 3-7 priorities per day. App mention – Monday.com (planning and collaboration with the team) Clickup (collaborate and more organic), Mural (for brainstorming/engaging your team for ideation)
• CEO Nugget: Think outside of the box. Talk about business challenges and share new and emerging approaches.
• CEO Defined: The power to choose who to work with. The opportunity to share your authentic self.

Website: sarawsheehan.com

Linkedin: Sara-Sheehan, Sara-Sheehan-consulting

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00:25 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkless values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I AM CEO Podcast.

00:53 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO Podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today Sarah Sheehan of Sarah W. Sheehan.com Sarah, super excited to have you on the show.

01:03 – Sara Sheehan

Thank you so much. I am so glad to be here and to be able to chat with you and reach out to the listeners.

01:12 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, super excited to have you on as well too and so excited to hear about your brilliance. We had a great, you know, first talk and I'm super excited we get to dive a little bit deeper with this interview. But of course, before we do that, I want to read a little bit more about Sarah so you can hear about some of those awesome things that she's working on Sarah is a consultant, consultant, and executive coach who works with C-level executive leaders in designing organizations, developing business strategies, managing change and optimizing talent and leadership development, and solving complex human performance.

Problems. Through executive coaching, Sarah helps leaders sprint their way up the corporate ladder and increase their performance. And during Sarah's 25-plus years of business, she was she has worked with leaders, teams, organizations, and Fortune 100 companies and individuals. Sarah specializes in change management, talent, leadership, end of leadership development, executive coaching, and organizational design and as a collaborative, results-oriented coach, Sarah provides support and practical feedback to help clients effectively navigate change and address business challenges. She also integrates coaching techniques, methods, and approaches to help her clients develop change capabilities and learn to apply them the right way.

With a servant leadership mindset, she supports her clients in building new skills and customizes frameworks to her client's project needs she works with clients based on her network referrals and appointments so has been featured both nationally and internationally on podcasts as an expert and on topics of change management, talent, and leadership development, executive coaching and organizational vine, and of course super excited to have her on the I AM CEO podcast. Sarah, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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02:51 – Sara Sheehan

I am ready.

02:53 – Gresham Harkless

Let's make it happen. Then. So let's do it. To kind of kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit here, a little bit more on how you got started. What I call your CEO. CEO story.

03:02 – Sara Sheehan

Yeah, it's an. It's an interesting story. I have gone from working for many years, over 25 years with big consulting firms and Fortune 100 clients. And all of the firms that I worked with were essentially large multinationals with hundreds of thousands of employees and billions of dollars in revenue. So the big, big companies out there, and I've gone from being in that environment to working on my own. It's been a huge, huge shift.

A couple of years ago, the pandemic really served as a great opportunity for me to vault into another direction, pivot, if you will, and with a lot of faith and prayer added to that. I really had a great experience working with some very interesting clients. And I'm really starting to enjoy every single day that I'm able to talk to more prospective clients, whether it's clients for my consulting side of my business or my executive coaching side.

04:22 – Gresham Harkless

Nice.

04:23 – Sara Sheehan

It's really been an interesting couple of years.

04:26 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. And, you know, the word that really resonated with me, obviously we heard the word pivot a lot, but I love that you use their word vault, because I love just the, I guess, imagery that comes from that word. When you think about vaulting, when there is this type of change, and I imagine, like you said so well that that has happened to you, but it also sounds like that's a lot of what you've been able to kind of help clients out with, too, to be able to vault into what is the, I guess, the future and the new normal, so to speak.

04:54 – Sara Sheehan

Absolutely. In terms of pivoting or actually vaulting into the next opportunity, be it a higher level, a bigger purpose, making a bigger difference, that kind of thing. Absolutely. That's very central to what I'm doing and helping a client transform personally or to transform their business.

05:18 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I think so many times we forget we could see things in silos where, like you said, personally in the business, we can think that, okay, I imagine both of those overlaps, and they probably work in tandem. So when you have that opportunity to see that development, that growth, that vaulting, you know, as you said so well, you probably see that in so many different aspects of a person's life and also in the organization as well, too.

05:40 – Sara Sheehan

Absolutely. When I'm working with clients on a large business transformation, it almost always is such a stretch for the team. The client team that they do need opportunities to reflect and explore. So. So although each service area can be distinct and focused based on the client engagement, they can also be hats that I'm able to interchange with the client. Coming along for the ride, if you will. Knowing that I'm switching from being an advisor to exploring something with them as an executive coach.

06:24 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. I love that you've been able to kind of do that. So I know we touched a little bit upon, you know, some of the things that you're working, you know, and doing and helping, you know, to make sure your clients have that impact. Could you take us through anything more? We didn't kind of touch over touch on that. You doing, you know, from a service standpoint for your clients, and what you feel kind of even is your secret sauce and sets you apart and makes you unique.

06:47 – Sara Sheehan

Sure. And so if I were to kind of characterize the bigger projects that I work on, they are interesting and compelling. Generally speaking, they are larger businesses. However, I do believe any business with over $100 million in revenue could be a great potential client for me. You're kind of getting to a point where that company has enough complexity going on that they need someone with my human capital specialty to help them sort through the people-oriented side of the business. Many of my clients are much larger than that. Just to give you a couple of examples of projects last.

At the end of last year, I worked with a very large multinational to help them integrate a number of acquisitions from an organizational design perspective. And I helped them think through their new operating model. Now, after the project that I helped them with, they were going to have a lot of additional change management and leadership alignment work to do. But it definitely helped them get to the next step where they were going to be able to fully get all of the leaders on the same page about how their business operated. That's a great example of how I can work with a business.

There are so many businesses out there that are acquiring companies and needing to integrate them and they don't really think about what they're doing other than just bolting that new team on. And there's really so much more that goes into it. Other types of things that I do do, I might do. For instance, now I'm working on a large digital transformation. I've done many, many projects like this where I help a client adapt and adopt a new technology and adjust all of their processes and behaviors to go with it. In terms of executive coaching, I work with busy executives to help them with accountability action, develop better relationships, and get an advisory team around them to help them be more successful in the future.

There are so many people, as they progress their careers beyond the manager level, that they really need the structure and support of an executive coach to really help them level up into the VP level or above. Behavior change is one of the hardest things to do, and people don't think it is. But when you actually get into the details of what it takes to really implement new behaviors, it is a tough thing to do. I love the concept of standing on the shoulders of giants. That is so powerful. It's a wonderful thing. So, yes, that is right in line with how I'm striving to make a difference and an impact.

10:21 – Gresham Harkless

And I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have, but what's something you feel makes you more effective and efficient?

10:30 – Sara Sheehan

First of all, you know, as a person I am very planful and organized in how I approach a day or a week. And so I generally will set three to seven priorities for a day and I will work that list until it's done. That may be boring to some people, but man, it works for me. It really does. In terms of things that may not be as widely known or emerging technologies out there, there are three that I would recommend that people take a look at. If you want to have more collaborative and productive meetings with your team, you might consider checking out Monday.com ClickUp, or Mural. All three platforms really are used for different purposes.

Monday is a tremendous planning platform and collaboration across teams and it is so powerful I can't recommend it enough. It's easy to use and it will really help your team get organized. If it's not, let's say if you're not using Project Checkout Monday, ClickUp is a platform that allows you to collaborate and write and you can be planful on ClickUp as well. It's just a little bit more organic than Monday, I would say.

And then finally, Mural is a wonderful application cloud-based tool that you can use to brainstorm. And you can use it in all kinds of different ways to engage your team in, for instance, understanding who a particular stakeholder is and what they need, or maybe brainstorming a solution to a new problem that you have. But it's great for ideation.

12:42 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I love each of those. Now, I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO nugget. You might have already touched on this, but it's a little bit more of a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It's something I like to say you might say if you were to talk to your favorite client or potentially if you were to hop into a time machine and tell your younger business self.

13:00 – Sara Sheehan

Yeah, I love the thought of talking to my younger self. That's very powerful. One thing that I would say or offer is just that I think it's okay to think completely outside of the box. And I say that as someone that you know. I have worked for four large firms in management consulting and I've definitely seen the best practice way to approach the work. But I also have the ability at this point to think outside the box and engage clients in a different way.

And so I'm currently working through setting up a paid community where I can engage with people who are for instance, manager to C suite change makers who are looking for a positive place to discuss business challenges and talk about hard-won lessons learned in the change space as well as share new and emerging change approaches with others so that we can all improve not only at work but our teams and in our careers.

14:28 – Gresham Harkless

Nice. I absolutely love that. So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. And we're hoping that different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So Sarah, what does being a CEO mean to you?

14:40 – Sara Sheehan

Well, it's it means that I have the power to choose who I work with, such as vendors, and clients. I have the opportunity to show up as my authentic self and that's such a powerful gift to be able to be who you are.

15:02 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And so often I say if you, if you run your own race, you can't lose. Just wanted to pass the mic just to see if there's anything additional that you want to let the readers and listeners say. And of course, how best people can get a hold of you and find out about all the awesome things you're working on.

15:17 – Sara Sheehan

By all means, I would love to hear from the readers and the listeners. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me. Please check out my website@sarawshehan.com that's S A R A W S H E E Or you can find me on LinkedIn@LinkedIn.com n Slasheehan I would love to hear from you. Questions, comments? Definitely love the engagement.

15:57 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, absolutely. And to make it even easier, we'll have the links and information in the show notes as well too so that people can follow up with you. But Sarah, truly appreciate your time. Appreciate even more what you're doing that human capital is so important. So I'd love for you to be able to share your brilliance with us and of course with so many organizations. So thank you so much again my friend and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:16 – Sara Sheehan

Thank you. I hope you do as well. Take good care.

16:19 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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