We help leaders advance their careers.
Being an executive is a demanding pursuit, especially if you aspire to excellence as a leader. Would it help to have a place to reflect? A sounding board? A trusted advisor? Would you like to have a reliable ally to help you advance your executive career? Workplace Psychology offers a full array of executive coaching services - including skill mentoring, career counseling, and stress handling - in a confidential private practice setting. Joel Mausner PhD (our Founding Principal) has worked as an executive coach for 25 years, across a wide array of industries, organizational settings, and levels of managerial responsibility, including with many senior executives and CEOs. Most of our Associates are also deeply experienced as executive coaches. Contact us for a free phone consult to assess mutual fit, and to learn how we can address your individual needs.
Good leaders deserve good support,
customized to their individual needs.
Executive Skill Mentoring - Classical Executive Coaching
Executive Skill Mentoring is traditional or classical executive coaching. It is executive coaching that focuses on performance issues of leadership and management and on skill building to address those issues. This sort of coaching is especially valuable at times of career transition, when one's pre-existing skills need to stretch - e.g., when adjusting to big changes in work requirements or environments, or when assuming an elevated and more demanding role. If the executive skills that you need to improve are primarily people leadership skills - i.e., interpersonal and self-management skills (rather than technical business skills) - then our Executive Skill Mentoring is likely a good fit for you. We can help expand your repertoire of skills across the full spectrum (360 degrees) of executive performance.
Skill Mentoring across The 360 Spectrum of Executive Performance
Managing Below: we can coach you to address a range of issues with your team and reports, such as:
Hiring and on-boarding new team members
Delegating responsibility and accountability
Supervising ongoing performance of reports
Conducting formal performance appraisals
Facilitating teamwork and sustaining morale
Proffering critical and constructive feedback
Managing performance improvement plans
Firing employees as needed (yet humanely)
Managing Above: we can coach you to address a range of issues with your boss or bosses, such as:
Building closer, stronger, more positive relations with your boss or bosses
Contributing your voice and role perspective to strategic-level discussions
Aligning your unit and engaging your team with overall enterprise strategy
Messaging and clarifying communications, both top-down and bottom-up
Managing your unit’s work to achieve effective results with cost efficiency
Justifying budget and resource requests in terms persuasive to your bosses
Learning to gauge what your bosses really want, and if/how to supply that
Learning how to fight the battles that matter in terms of long-term success
Managing Across: we can coach you to address a range of issues with your peer-colleagues, such as:
Managing across the full organizational matrix (not just your chain of command)
Exercising leadership on cross-functional teams (as well as on your boss's team)
Managing outwards, e.g., with customers, suppliers, regulators, and other players
Building your reputation (credibility & visibility) with key peers and stakeholders
Managing Within: we can coach you to address a range of issues with your own personality, such as:
Presenting yourself with more confidence, in both conversations and formal meetings
Managing yourself, your emotions and your work habits, to optimize your consistency
Managing conflict with bosses, peers and reports, with assertive yet tactful diplomacy
Balancing work demands and career ambitions with family care and personal desires
Of course, these are only a sample of the myriad issues that we've helped our clients with in executive coaching. Whatever the specific challenges you're currently facing, we can likely help you to manage them better. Simultaneously, we help you to acquire an improved "skills toolkit", which enables you to sustain your success going forward. Contact us to let us know the specific challenges you're facing, and we'll let you know how we might help. Workplace Psychology offers a confidential private practice setting with offices in New York City & White Plains NY (and we also coach clients across the US and Western Europe via video chat or teleconference).
Designing and STaffing Executive Coaching Programs for organizations
In addition to our private practice coaching, Workplace Psychology also offers programmatic executive coaching services for organizations. We have participated in the design and delivery of several in-house coaching and mentoring programs. And we often provide executive coaching as a component element of the broader consulting initiatives we conduct with organizations - e.g., re team building, culture change, conflict management, or leadership learning. We are readily able to staff these initiatives and programs with our Workplace Psychology Associates, most of whom are deeply experienced as executive coaches. Contact us to discuss how we can enhance your organization with executive coaching services.
“As the Chief Marketing Officer of a high-growth fin tech firm, I tackle a wide range of leadership challenges - strategic, tactical, organizational, managerial. Joel Mausner has been my executive coach for the past several years. He serves me as an objective sounding board, and even more importantly, he’s been insightful and creative in guiding my self-exploration. Joel has an impressive ability to validate and contextualize the things I’m saying, as well as to understand and articulate the things I’m not! Over time, he’s become my trusted advisor - helping me both to refine my leadership performance and to navigate my career trajectory.”
Keep your career moving along,
by learning to be a career entrepreneur.
Executive Career Counsel - The 4 M’s of Career Motion
Building a career is a lifetime journey, and pursuing a career in management can be especially demanding. Good leaders know what to do to lead their people on an enterprise mission, but they aren't always so effective at leading themselves on their own career path. Success at navigating one's career, especially in a rapidly changing world, can require an entrepreneurial mindset. In other words, it helps to pursue your career as if it were an entrepreneurial venture. Workplace Psychology can help you to develop that mindset, and the skills you need to leverage your career with confidence. Depending on where you currently are in your career trajectory, and where you want to go, we can help you to move forward in various ways.
Moving in: on-boarding into a New Position
We can help you to "move in" by coaching you on a range of issues, such as:
Building relationships with your boss(es), peers and reports.
Understanding and clarifying your new boss's expectations.
Clarifying and testing your role authority and accountability.
Learning the workplace culture and its norms of teamwork.
Learning to "read the tea leaves" and manage office politics.
Demonstrating the "value proposition" of your contributions.
Moving Up: Building Your Case For Promotion
We can help you to "move up" by coaching you on a range of issues, such as:
Proving your competence by mastering your current role requirements.
Developing and showing broader capability, beyond your current role.
Building your credibility, via reliable follow-through and initiative-taking.
Fostering your visibility, by promoting your achievements and expertise.
Navigating office politics in a manner that sustains trusting relationships.
Negotiating your path to promotion, and delivering a persuasive "pitch".
Moving Out: The Nuts and Bolts Of Job Search
We can help you to "move out" by coaching you on a range of issues, such as:
Preparing Your Search: e.g., defining a direction and specific targets of your job search, polishing your resume and other career materials, reaching out to your network to discover new possibilities.
Spreading Your Wings: e.g., exploring your viable opportunities, expanding your network, working with recruiters, preparing for your interviews and presenting yourself with confidence in interviews.
Navigating Your Move: e.g., following-up in the aftermath of interviews, responding to job offers strategically, vetting employers for probable fit, negotiating employment terms (pay, perks, etc).
Moving On: Transcending The Box Of Your Job
We can help you to "move on" by coaching you on a range of issues, such as:
Preparing Yourself for a Leap: e.g., seeing beyond your prior work, letting go of emotional baggage that’s boxed you in, appreciating the breadth and transferability of your acquired skills as a leader.
Exploring Where You Might Land: e.g., thinking about what's meaningful for you, remembering earlier passions and paths not taken, considering new possibilities without limiting preconceptions.
Embarking on a Realistic Adventure: i.e., making a choice to alter your life in dramatic ways, but making that choice realistically, with a clear idea of the challenges involved in a radical transition.
If these kinds of issues speak to you, and however you want to move in your career - whether in, up, out, or on - we have the know-how to help. Workplace Psychology - with offices in New York City and White Plains NY - specializes in Career Counseling and Job Transition Coaching for executives, managers, and other leaders. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you to jump-start, accelerate, re-start or transform your career development journey.
“I am the Chief Learning Officer in a knowledge service business. Sensing a need for change, I worked with Joel for two years on the nature of my work identity - what it has been and what I would like it to be. Joel is a wise and patient counselor, who understands much about the workplace, career aspiration and human psychology. With his help, I’ve come to better understand my own preferred work identity - i.e., what I really value, and what I choose to do with my future. As a result, I am deeply satisfied with where I am now headed in my career. Many thanks to Joel for his consistently helpful counsel.”
Don't let those tricky spots mess you up!
Learn to manage your stressful moments.
Executive Stress Handling - Emotional “Spot Coverage”
Executive Stress Handling is a flexible mixture of executive coaching and psychotherapy: it's stress management customized for executives. Some leaders are best served by a straightforward coaching approach – that is, a confidential forum where they can share problems and vent about struggles, a “sounding board” to brainstorm options and vet solutions, and the wisdom of a seasoned advisor who has worked with a wide range of leaders. But other leaders need something more to truly optimize the benefits of coaching. They need the expertise of an experienced psychotherapist, to help them deal with underlying emotional issues that are interfering with their leadership effectiveness (and perhaps other parts of their lives). Our Executive Stress Handling intertwines both of these approaches, with synergistic results.
Occasionally people in leadership positions suffer from fairly serious mental health issues, but those are the exceptions. More commonly, many leaders (like most people) are susceptible to emotional regression in the face of significant stress. In other words, leaders don’t always function at their best. And when that's the case, leaders may experience emotional difficulties that are best addressed with a psychotherapeutic approach. Here are some common examples of emotional difficulties that can impede leader effectiveness - and that you too may experience at times :
Anxious feelings or “tense spots”, which can disrupt your performance and leadership presence in many ways, and may also generate stress that spills into your life beyond work.
Depressed feelings or “down spots”, that can sap your energy for work or make it hard to sustain a positive attitude, and which may impact the morale of your colleagues as well.
Intemperate behaviors or “hot spots”, where you are suddenly triggered to act in ways that sabotage your better judgment (e.g., angry outbursts), which you can’t seem to control.
Inhibited behaviors or “stuck spots”, where you get obstructed by resistance in yourself (e.g., procrastination or creative blocking), which you can’t seem to "unstick" or overcome.
Unexpressed reactions or “mute spots”, where there are things you've been wanting to say to others, but you can’t seem to find the right words or the right time to articulate them.
Unintended reactions or “blind spots”, where you perceive that you are somehow provoking undesirable responses from others, but you don’t know why, or what to do differently.
These are the sorts of issues that may require some psychotherapy to be successfully overcome. But they don't generally require a separate or lengthy course of therapy. These (and other) emotional issues can be commonly addressed and resolved as part of an executive coaching process that integrates aspects of psychotherapy. Workplace Psychology - with confidential offices in New York City and White Plains NY - specializes in providing stress management that is customized for executives. Contact us for an initial consultation, to assess if this approach is what you need.
“As the CEO of a nonprofit organization, I worked with Joel Mausner over five years in a variety of ways - including executive coaching, conflict management, stress management, and career counseling. Joel has been an incredible help to me as an objective listener and as a guide to the challenges I was facing - some of which were attributable to a merger process I was leading, and some of which were emotional. He helped me to dig through the noise of life (both personally and professionally) to find and address the issues that were truly affecting me. Together, we developed tools to confront my challenges, strengthen my leadership skills, and to mitigate my stress. I am grateful to Joel for his genuine care for my well-being, for his wise and insightful counseling, and for his support in exploring and planning the road ahead.”