Advance critical thinking through coaching

Overview

As organizations and their people face increasingly complex problems, the need for critical thinking and problem-solving is ever more critical. Whether it’s managing a vulnerable supply chain, seeking efficiencies in serving customers through AI, connecting disparate technologies to capture business intelligence or improving product quality, the myriad of complex problems continues. Critical thinking is the ability to interpret, analyze, evaluate, explain and find results in uncertain situations. It is about being an active learner rather than a passive recipient of information. Critical thinkers identify, analyze and solve problems systematically rather than by intuition or instinct.

This presentation will expose the audience to the value of coaching as a key element in developing critical thinkers and problem solvers to drive improvement through creativity and collaboration in their organizations. The presentation will distinguish between coaching, mentoring and teaching; give participants a standard model for coaching individuals and teams; and share best practices in coaching techniques to develop continuous improvement leaders. The presenter shares their coaching experience in organizations such as Nationwide, Veterans Administration, Constellation, Ohio State University and George Washington University.

Key learning objectives

1. Distinguish between coaching, mentoring and teaching
2. Identify key coaching competencies to develop others
3. Utilize the GROW coaching model
4. Apply coaching best practices for boosting learning, collaboration and creativity

Companies

A Fortune 200 company headquartered in Baltimore, Constellation Energy Corporation (Nasdaq: CEG) is the nation’s largest producer of clean, carbon-free energy and a leading supplier of energy products and services to businesses, homes, community aggregations and public sector customers across the continental United States, including three fourths of Fortune 100 companies. With annual output that is nearly 90% carbon-free, its hydro, wind and solar facilities, paired with the nation’s largest nuclear fleet, have the generating capacity to power the equivalent of 16 million homes, providing about 10% of the nation’s clean energy. The company is further accelerating the nation’s transition to a carbon-free future by helping its customers reach their sustainability goals, setting its own ambitious goal of achieving 100% carbon-free generation by 2040 and investing in promising emerging technologies to eliminate carbon emissions across all sectors of the economy. https://www.constellationenergy.com/

E Squared Solutions empowers people and organizations — every day — to deliver exceptional value to its customers. The company helps defy established thinking and practices to spur positive change. https://www.esquaredsolutions.biz/

Presenters

Meredith Brody is a principal project manager at Constellation, a Fortune 200 company. Brody has spent over 21 years in the competitive retail energy industry, and over 16 of those years have been devoted to operational excellence in process improvement. Brody’s formal education in finance in both her undergraduate and graduate work gave her a unique business perspective when starting her process improvement career as a “percentage of time” Embedded Lean Practitioner over 16 years ago. From there, she completed an internal and company-sponsored Six Sigma Black Belt certification program and moved into a full-time process improvement role. Brody holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana and an MBA in finance from DePaul. 

Amita Sherwood is a certified Lean Six Sigma Master Black Belt with over 24 years of continuous improvement and organizational effectiveness experience in a variety of industries, including insurance, federal (DoD and civilian), health care, higher education, financial services and information technology. Sherwood has spent over 20 years partnering with private and public organizations in the areas of:

• Strategic planning
• Large-scale Lean Six Sigma deployment strategy and execution
• Development and delivery of Lean Six Sigma training (all levels)
• Project and team facilitation and coaching
• Leadership development and coaching
• Change management strategy planning and execution
• Performance metric development, reporting and monitoring
• Risk management deployment planning and execution

Sherwood holds a bachelor’s degree in management science and information systems from Pennsylvania State University.