Leadership · Executive coaching
Coaching the leader
Joanna Wasmuth coaches leaders one to one: the executive director, board chair or founder carrying more than the org chart says.
What it is
Coaching Programs pair Joanna Wasmuth with the leader carrying more than their title describes: an executive director, a board chair, a founder who has not put down the work only they know how to do. The coaching is one to one and built around the leader's own organization. Joanna brings twenty-five years in nonprofit leadership and philanthropy counsel, running campaigns from $10 million to $300 million and raising more than $30 million a year. Where delegation is the constraint, the Leadership Survey names it before coaching begins.
What you receive
| Stage | What lands | What it settles |
|---|---|---|
| Name the load | A conversation naming what the leader is carrying, beyond what the org chart describes | What is the leader's to carry, and what has never been handed to anyone else |
| Set the target | A defining-success conversation, the same opening move Joanna runs on every engagement | What the leader is coaching toward, agreed rather than assumed |
| Coach the work | Regular one-to-one sessions, built around the leader's own organization and real decisions | Whether the leader is carrying the work differently, shown in real decisions |
| Hand off what can move | A named list of what the leader has delegated, and to whom | What no longer depends on one person, and who it depends on instead |
What it needs from you
- The leader's time, on a regular cadence, for the coaching itself
- A frank account of what is being carried, including the parts that are hard to say out loud
- A defining-success conversation early in the engagement, to agree what the coaching is aiming at
- Where relevant, access to the board or the team the leader answers to
How it ends
Coaching runs on an agreed term, with a defining-success conversation at the start and, at the end, a named list of what the leader has put down. If the constraint turns out to be direction rather than one person's load, we say so and point you to the Leadership Survey.
Where it fits
Coaching Programs sit in the Executive coaching lane of Leadership. A delegation finding from the Leadership Survey often points a leader here. See the three stages for the full sequence, or the Leadership area for the rest of what we look at here.
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Where to go from here
One hour of your time, no charge: fifteen minutes on the Growth Check, then a forty-five-minute video call. We read every answer before the call.