derailers | Grow Strong Leaders

252: How to Help Transitioning Leaders Succeed

What causes so many leaders to fail when they are transitioning to a senior leadership role? Robert Witherspoon reveals important reasons, based on his decades of experience coaching leaders in transition. What he shares can help your organization avoid those pitfalls and instead ensure success.

Robert is a leadership coach for top executives, and he’s been serving leaders in business and government since 1990. He specializes in C-Suite and Leadership Transition Coaching.

Robert is the lead author, along with Randy White, of Four Essential Ways That Coaching Can Help Executives, the first field guide to executive coaching, published by the Center for Creative Leadership in 1997. Robert has been doing this work well before executive coaching and leadership development became popular boardroom language. Today he is considered a pioneer in the coaching profession.

His mission is to provide immediate impact, measurable results, and sustainable success. He achieves this by helping leaders develop their leadership skills and facilitating their transitions to new roles.

You’ll discover:

What Leadership Transition is and why it matters
Some of the key transitions that have major impact on an organization
What’s often missing before a leader moves into a new position
The role of robust assessments in identifying potential challenges for the leader

Watch the episode:

Connect with Robert

Robert’s Website

Performance & Leadership

Connect with Your Team

Mastering the Top 10 Communication Skills

Order from Amazon

Peer Coaching Made Simple

How to Do the 6 Things That Matter Most When Helping Someone Improve a Skill

Order from Amazon

237: Avoid Leadership Derailers and Common Traps of Living

In your role as a leader and in other areas of your life, what kinds of habits have prevented you from being as effective as you’d like to be? My guest Gregg Vanourek has studied and written about these leadership derailers and common traps of living, and we cover several of them in this conversation.

Gregg runs Gregg Vanourek LLC, a training and development firm, and teaches at the University of Denver and Stockholm Business School. He helps people with leadership, personal growth, and life design through his books, courses, workshops, speaking, and coaching.

Gregg has been an entrepreneur for most of his career. He was a tech startup executive at K12 Inc., which is now a market leader with $1 billion in sales. He also co-founded New Mountain Ventures, focused on developing entrepreneurial leaders.

Gregg is co-author of three influential books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs about infusing your life with passion and purpose, and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations. He’s working on a new book about the common traps of living.

You can take the two assessments Gregg refers to in this interview, “Leadership Derailers” and “Traps Test,” for free on his website.

You’ll discover:

What Gregg considers the superpowers of leaders
Why both Head and Heart are necessary to lead effectively
The #1 leadership derailer that causes problems for leaders and their teams
The most common traps of living that prevent people from experiencing the success and happiness they desire
Specific suggestions for changing these into positive habits