Hawaii WBE Feature: Leadership Coaching

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX Studios, it’s time for Women In Motion. Brought to you by WBEC-West. Join forces. Succeed together. Now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, another episode of Women In Motion and this is going to be a good one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, WBEC-West. Without them, we couldn’t be sharing these important stories. Today on Women In Motion, we have Sarah Kalicki Nakamura with Th!nk. Welcome.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Well, good morning!

Lee Kantor: I am so excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us about Th!nk.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: So Th!nk is a learning and development company where we really help leaders and teams to reach their full potential and help people get along at work. We do it through executive coaching, team building, as well as leadership training.

Lee Kantor: So, what’s your back story? How’d you get involved in this line of work?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Well, like every story, it starts – you know, the seed is planted kind of way before the business even flourishes. I moved to Hawaii back in 1994, and when I moved to Hawaii, I was super excited about the change and moving there, but it ended up being somewhat of a difficult transition for me, just kind of finding my footing in the state and finding what do I do and who am I when I’m there.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: So, I worked in the hospitality industry at the time, and I was working with Hilton Hawaiian Village. I just started my job and I read a book about transitions. And when you’re having a difficult transition, it’s called your neutral zone. The exercise was to just list down as many things as you would ever want to do and start doing them. Get in forward motion to get yourself through this awkward period of time.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: And on my list was to actually go get a master’s degree, and I didn’t want to do it by myself. Just started this new job. I’m in a new state and there was a girl sitting next to me, I guess a woman sitting next to me, looked about my age, and I just introduced myself. I said, “Hey, I’m Sarah, I’m new to Hilton,” and she was new to Hilton too. And I said, “I’m thinking about getting a master’s degree. Have you ever thought about it?” She said, “Yep.” So I said, “Here’s the admission officer, give them a call. We’re going to start the program in a couple of weeks.” She signed up and we did the program together.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Fast forward a year and a half later, at the end of our program, we were asked to write a capstone project and a business plan, and we decided to do it on learning and development since that was our field, got a great grade on it, put it away. Intention was just to go back and work in hospitality and stay on track that way.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: And then I had my first son, and I realized I didn’t want to work the same way throughout that time when he was young and I needed to not commute as much. I wanted to have more time with him. So I dusted off. The business plan was written as a partnership, and so I went to my business partner, Cindy, and I said, “Hey, I’m going to do this and work differently while my children are young and wanted to see if you wanted to do it with me or give me permission to do it on my own.” She said, “You know what? I’ll quit my job too.” And we started the business. So we always laugh. We’re actually accidental businesswomen or business owners. It was all centered around a choice for how we wanted to raise our kids and run our family and have an income at the same time.

Lee Kantor: So, how did you make that transition to go from this concept and saying, okay, how do I – did you ease into it? Did you keep your job and then start trying to get clients on the side? Like, how did that transition occur?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Yeah, we went cold turkey. We did all the wrong things based on the business books, I think. So we literally quit our jobs. We set a goal for how much money we needed to make, which was very little. We just needed to pay, like, certain bills. So I always tell people, like, aim higher because we kept making the little bit of money that we were wishing for until we started setting stretch goals, and we just sought out our first client. We just started telling people what we were doing and we, you know, delivered our first, I think it was a customer service program for a hospital. And, you know, our belief system has always been just do great work each time. And the more people we help, the more business will follow. And I never thought we would be here about 24 years later under this identity.

Lee Kantor: So, how did you go about getting those early clients? You know, going from kind of a corporate setting, I don’t know if your job was sales, but when you’re an entrepreneur, everyone’s job sales. So, how did that take place that, you know, now I have to sell something?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: You know, we were in human resources, actually, so we weren’t sale – I mean, everybody does sales, but we were in human resources. We were specifically in leadership development training, and we had made connections out in the community and people we’d worked with. And like a lot of things, I’m sure everywhere but for sure in Hawaii, it’s just good relationships. So we just started calling people in and letting them know what we were doing and asking them if they needed any help with that. And one client turned into another client that turned into another client. One of the things we’re most proud of is that many of our clients from day one will still use our services over this period of time.

Lee Kantor: So, was your business primarily at the time Hawaii-based?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Yes, our business is primarily Hawaii-based. Still is. So most of our clients are still in Hawaii, although we’ve expanded to Las Vegas recently and we’ve had some mainland clients over the years, and so we’ve been able to service them more. And our hope and our wish is that we’re going to be able to grow more in this area as well.

Lee Kantor: So, what is usually your point of entry with a company?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: You know, it’s been interesting. It’s just meeting people. Usually – well, our entry would be at the director or vice president or CEO level. And it’s typically through some sort of either volunteer project or community meeting where we’re able to start making these connections, or that somebody has heard about our work that we’ve done for other people and they’ve given us, you know, a reference or a lead saying that hey, you know what? They’ve helped things up, helped us. Maybe they can help you, too.

Lee Kantor: So, are you going in to do, like, a project, like, hey, do this, you know, workshop, or we need this kind of teaching happening because we had an issue, so we need someone to teach this thing?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Yeah. So, they’re usually calling because maybe an executive needs some coaching to take it from this level to the next level, and they just need some guidance in that. So executive coaching would be one entry point.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Strategic planning would be another entry point. An executive body needs to think about the next three years out and where the organization wants to go. They need somebody to facilitate that conversation to help them map that path. In our construction and military environment, we do a lot of partnering meetings. So when the military and a construction group get together before they kick off a project, they need to form a partnering meeting where they, you know, learn how to work together. They learn about each other’s strengths, weaknesses, build some trusting relationships so that they can have a successful project.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: And then it could be in leadership development. They have a group of people that they know that they want to invest in, to help them have those interpersonal skills and strategic skills to go ahead and lead the organization as they build a succession plan or a bench.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: And then also when people need to just get along at work, maybe there’s some conflict or some difficulties, some pain spots on a team, it’s just not working so well, we can come in and we often will help them get unstuck and find ways to, you know, really value each other’s differences and thrive.

Lee Kantor: Now, how have you seen coaching evolve in the business world? At one point, it was just for either senior, you know, the most senior of people and/or somebody there trying to fix that has a problem that needs some, you know, help. Are you seeing it kind of being disseminated throughout the entire organization nowadays?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Oh, it’s everywhere. It’s such a funny thing. When we started over 20 years ago, it was kind of unheard of. You know, maybe the highest-level executive had it. And you’re right. Maybe somebody needed to fix something. Or maybe oftentimes, you know, once you get to that, that CEO level, you just need somebody to bounce ideas off of because, really, it is lonely at the top, right? You don’t have a lot of peers you can talk about what you’re thinking about strategy for your company, and then you can’t talk to your direct reports. So it was a very unique, small niche kind of business.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Nowadays, everybody’s involved in it. So we do some long-term leadership training programs and embedded in that. By long-term, I mean we work with companies for three to 12 months where a cohort of people go together to experience leadership lessons and to develop their skills at a certain level so that they can help propel the organization built into those programs. Now, it’s supportive coaching after each session for every person. And this would go from a senior-level person all the way down to a high performer or a high-potential performer. So we’re seeing it go all the way through the organization from highest level to maybe C-suite to directors, managers, all the way to supervisors and somebody maybe in the succession planning pipeline that they’re helping, they’re trying to grow to get to the next level.

Lee Kantor: Are you also seeing it as kind of things that must be there to attract younger talent like that? Younger talent wants to see some sort of coaching or some sort of training that’s going to help upskill them so they’re going to get that out of the experience.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Yeah, I would say with the younger talent where we’re seeing it be a talent attractor or a magnet of sorts, a recruiting tool, is when they have set programs in place and clear learning steps. So if an organization in their organizational development plan, they can show somebody, when you enter here, here’s the pathway to learning all the way through your career as well as here’s some potential succession steps that you can take. So that’s really valuable to them when it’s already embedded.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: And I’d also say that our younger or newer in their career steps are also looking for mentoring, not just coaching. And I would say the difference would be is coaching is they’re working on something that they personally want to develop and is very specific and we’re going to grow that skill set. Mentoring is that trusted person that they can go for advice inside and outside of the organization. It may not be specifically to develop a skill set but to just develop that relationship and just that tacit knowledge, that knowledge that can only happen by working with somebody who’s been through something.

Lee Kantor: What are some symptoms that an organization is going through, that they may not connect the dots where, hey, maybe we should bring somebody on to help us in this area when it comes to coaching or leadership development?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Oh, that’s a great one. A more high turnover is an obvious one, right? If you have a high turnover, we have to drill down to the root cause of that. And the root cause could be maybe the supervisor is not fully developed. Maybe the manager is not clarifying what the job is. Well, maybe when they’re onboarding, there’s not a system in set to train somebody and build their confidence and competence really directly. So that would be a reason that you would want to call us.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: You might also be having a team that’s working together and you know they’re just not reaching their full potential. It’s a little sticky. There’s a bit of infighting. People is competing for individual success, not collective success, and there’s just not that openness and transparency of sharing information. In those team issues, we put people together and we just assume everything’s going to work perfectly. But there are actually systems that need to be put in place, both interpersonal and structural systems that we need to do when we assemble any team.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: And then maybe you’re also finding out that you’re not able to attract top talent. Or when it’s time to promote people, you realize you don’t have anybody internally to promote, which is a misstep, right? If somebody is hired by us, our belief system is they should actually be prepared to grow their career with us. And if we’re not developing them for the next level, then maybe we didn’t do our job well, and you might want to call in somebody like us to make sure that you have those growth opportunities and people are growing in your organization, not just staying stagnant.

Lee Kantor: Now, have you ever worked with a high-level executive and that person didn’t notice that there was friction or silos and there were, you know, problem people in the organization because to them everything seemed fine and the reports they’re getting everything seemed fine. But you dig a layer too deep and you’re like, “Dude, there’s some problems here. Like, this is – you have -things are on fire.”

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Yeah. Of course. Right. That happens frequently. Because there’s a certain level where you may not be completely in touch or the people who are reporting to you, you know, perceive everything as going well. But if you dig down deeper and you look at certain things happening, you can get a sense that we need to figure out more here. So you may have a sense that your engagement scores are down. That’s a symptom that you may have some troublesome leadership inside the organization.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Maybe even your customer service scores are down and they’ll call us and say, “We have to do customer service training.” You’re like, “Well, what do you want to talk about?” They said, “Well, you know, our customers are saying that people don’t smile. They don’t have a nice tone of voice. They’re not saying hello right away.” And our question would be is, do you think your people really don’t know how to smile, don’t really know how to use the right tone of voice? It’s possible. Or is it that they’re not wanting to do that? You know, it doesn’t feel good. They don’t feel good being here, and therefore they’re not feeling in a way that they can communicate that to others. And oftentimes that’s the case. And so that would be a case where we’d say, we got to dig into this, right? We have to figure out exactly what’s going on to create that culture.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Gossiping is another symptom that we can hear, if there’s certain gossiping or if people won’t just speak up in a meeting. When meetings are quiet and silent, sometimes leaders view that as agreeing, being agreeable to whatever they’re saying. But oftentimes that’s just people being fearful or not willing to say what’s on their mind because the trust level is low. And then we have to put in some systems to make sure that we can open that up in the environment.

Lee Kantor: How important are kind of regular assessments when it comes to engagement and the things that you mentioned?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Well, we’re a big believer in self-assessments and 360 assessments where we love data and a different way of asking questions so that we can get actually tangible information of what to start working on. So we really love the Everything DiSC Workplace Profile to help people understand what their preferences and tendencies are for communicating with others and how others want to communicate to them and just build that environment of understanding that we all bring strengths to the team and how do we best use them.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: We also love the Five Behaviors product for team development, so they can take time to assess where are they at in trust. Are they engaging in conflict productively? Are they committing to ideas and moving forward? How well are they holding each other accountable? And are they pursuing collective or individual results?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: And we also believe in the PXT Checkpoint 360. That’s a 360 assessment where people can actually go out and ask people for feedback about their leadership and give them tangible skills that they need to work on so they can be even a more effective leader. And when things are down, rooted in data and there’s other profiles and assessments we like, but that rooting in data allows us to disconnect from our feelings and really look at what is and take that time to kind of look at ourselves through a different lens and really reflect on how is this working for us. And then from there, the strategies begin.

Lee Kantor: So what’s kind of the rhythm of those types of assessments? Because so many organizations and sometimes when you have dysfunctional organizations that have trust issues, they – you know, the people see this coming and they’re like, “Oh, here we go. We’re going to do this thing. We do it one time. And then, you know, I’m a yellow and you’re a blue, and then it sits on the shelf. And then, you know, we don’t talk about it anymore.”

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Yeah, yeah. The problem is we don’t talk about it anymore. That’s the problem, part of it, because, you know, that self-assessment part that’s always valuable as you look at it. I’m going to break this down in a couple of ways. So let’s take the yellow-blue and the color. I’m going to reflect on myself. I think that’s where organizations make the mistake. They share the content like, “Hey, look about this key information. Isn’t it cool?” And it is cool to look at yourself through another lens. And then we end and we just have a label but we don’t have so what. Like, so what do I do with this now? And I think we’re super committed to the so-what part of it. Now that you know this information, so what can you do with it? How can you apply it to make your life easier and other people more comfortable working with you and that practice component and embedding it into operations?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: So one of the things we do before we work with a company is first, make sure they’re really ready for the long-term development of it, right? Not just only short-term impact. While that has its place when we’re they’re looking for culture change, we have to really make sure that they’re going to be in it for the long haul. And then we help them look at their operations, like, where can you take this information and embed it in something you’re already doing? So we’re using the language throughout the organization.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Now on the other side, you said you were talking about the trust like the team trust or if trust is low and then it’s the oh, no, we’re going to do this survey. Is anybody going to really listen or do anything with it? In those cases, we spend some time priming the organization, meaning we have one-to-one meetings with the participants before they do it, usually sitting at the team level. We talk to them about what the assessment is, what they want to get out of it, why they would want to participate what we’re trying to do, and we make that one-to-one connection first and really get to know a little bit more about the person. And then we invite them to take the survey and we show them in that process our commitment to that we’ve set up with their executive to actually carry it all the way through until there’s some sort of resolution that’s satisfying to the team.

Lee Kantor: Now, why was it important for your firm to become part of WBEC-West?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: It’s a funny thing. So, we’ve been around for 24 years, technically with the name Th!nk a little less than that. And we’re a women-owned business. Me and my best friend own it, although that was another rule we broke. I think somebody told us the only ship that doesn’t sail is a partnership, but we do. We sail well. And as a women-owned business, it was to us for a long time, like, isn’t it obvious? We’re two women and we own it, so we are one.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: And then, we would try to do the designation and it just – life would get away from us and we wouldn’t do it. And we finally met somebody named Monica Coburn here in Las Vegas, Nevada, and she’s a business consultant who helped us really see the importance of it and navigate the process. Once we got our designation, I just realized probably something I didn’t even notice is just this whole world of opportunity opened up to us.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: WBEC-West keeps us in the loop of future opportunities. There’s educational opportunities. Just even having the logo on our site and in our signature line has helped us even secure more business for people who are really interested in working with women business enterprises. And I’d say we’re probably just scratching the surface of all the goodness. We’ve only had it for about a year. We’ve recertified, and we’re excited to keep getting deeper and deeper and give back to, right, find our ways to give back as well as be supported by the organization.

Lee Kantor: Now, can you share a story about a company that went to you with a challenge and how you were able to help them kind of overcome that and get to a new level? And obviously don’t name the name of the company but maybe share what challenge they had and how you were able to help them.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Yeah. Gosh. There’s so many ones. I’m trying to figure out which one would be most satisfying. Would you prefer a team conversation?

Lee Kantor: Well, whatever you think may be the most rewarding, where you’re like, oh, I made an impact that this really helped.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: We do this series called Growing Leaders, and it’s a six-month program that we bring inside organizations, and it’s really a leadership development program that focuses on interpersonal skills. And embedded in that is the content, a cohort goes to work together, and then they also are able to apply the lessons afterward. And we’ve recently been working with a healthcare company and we’re working at actually supervisory level. So these are early leaders. And at the end of this program, we do a graduation. And in that graduation, people talk about the most valuable lesson they learned or how it impacted them. And over and over again, what we hear is, I wish I would have known this earlier. It would have helped me so much. I’m now able to handle difficult conversations. I have the confidence and competence to speak up like I hadn’t been able to do before. I’m able to lead my team better, and now I’m willing to apply for jobs that I wasn’t actually thinking that I was qualified before. And it’s making a difference in terms of how we’re managing our budget, how we’re managing turnover, and how we’re growing our leaders.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: And we’ve now started with one cohort in that organization. They’re now on their I think they’re going to be on their fifth cohort because the organization is really seeing trust, just grow amongst all of their management team who have been going through it. They’re seeing that people are handling situations more directly. They’re able to – where they’re able to understand the business at hand and give innovative ideas to making sure that they meet their business demands.

Lee Kantor: Wow. So what do you need more of? How can we help you?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Oh, gosh. We need people who would love our help. So if there’s organizations out there who have a team that they feel they’re just not working to their fullest potential and they just need a little help, we’d love a call to see if we can help out with that.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: If you have a leadership group and you just know that you want to put in a leadership program and you want to support your future and current leaders by giving them a common language and easy-to-apply strategies that will make a difference in their business and in the world that they live in, we’d love to be able to do that. And then if there’s somebody out there who just needs some one-on-one support, maybe there’s a business need that they have that they would like to just get a little bit better at in terms of a skill set, we’d love to be able to help them with that too.

Lee Kantor: Now, do you specialize in certain industries or are you industry agnostic?

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: We are industry agnostic. Our philosophy is if you have people, we’re probably – we’re a good fit for your industry. But the perfect client for us is somebody who really believes in personal development and growth and that it really makes a difference.

Lee Kantor: Good stuff. Well, Sarah, congratulations on all the growth and all the success. And thank you so much for sharing your story today. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you.

Sarah Kalicki Nakamura: Thank you very much, Lee.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor. We’ll see you all next time on Women In Motion.