Strategic Coach Resources

If you’ve ever come back from a workshop or conference with a head full of ideas and wished that downloading them into the hands of your team could be as easy as syncing your Palm Pilot, you’re not alone. Many entrepreneurs struggle with this challenge of getting their thinking across to their team members.

Don Munce, a Strategic Coach® client since 1995, was frustrated for years by this quandary until he came up with a solution: a four-step process he calls “The Strategic Conversation.” The relatively simple steps of this process require very little of Don’s time, and he and his team of approximately 60 employees have been using it successfully for almost two years.

As an entrepreneur, Don feels he isn’t alone in his tendency to come up with significantly more ideas than he, or his team, can execute. “It’s surprising to me how many times I’ve shared one of those ‘brilliant ideas’ with someone only to find out later they’ve been burning a lot of time on it, and I realize I’ve been paying them to do something I no longer have any energy for,” Don says.

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“It has really balanced the burden for accomplishing our company goals so that it no longer is just my area of responsibility”
∗ Don Munce ∗

Attending quarterly workshops has inspired Don’s strategic thinking and new ideas, but communicating those ideas to his team wasn’t an easy task. “Each time I go to Strategic Coach, it’s like the floodgates open,” Don explains. “I’ve found one of the difficult things is being able to come back and capture those things for conversations and direction with my team.”

Enter Don’s Unique Process™, The Strategic Conversation*. Almost from the moment he developed it at his Coach workshop two years ago, it was accepted as practice within his organization and has transformed his communication with his team. “There was instant recognition that this solves some key problems,” Don says. “It was implemented within two weeks, and we’ve done it religiously every quarter since.”

One of the most obvious by-products of creating and using this process has been the increase in his team’s confidence. “It has removed one of their biggest fears,” Don explains. “That sometime during the quarter I’m going to remember something I thought about six weeks ago, and that I gave myself eight weeks to get done, and I’m going to come in and dump it on them and put all kinds of pressure on them to meet my schedule.”

Don has also personally benefited from using The Strategic Conversation every quarter. “It has really balanced the burden for accomplishing our company goals so that it no longer is just my area of responsibility,” he says.

A final result is that Don’s Free Days have never been better — or easier to take. “It’s made a big difference in my ability to go away and know there is a list of all the key projects and goals I’ve established for the business during the quarter,” he says. “There aren’t any surprises waiting in my head to come out. My head has basically been emptied and put onto a piece of paper with this process.”

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