Services

Leadership Development Services

At Development First LLC, we provide coaching, consultation, facilitation, and curriculum for corporate clients of all sizes.

Consulting

Here is how Development First LLC helped organizations to achieve their performance objectives.

Created an on-boarding process, and redesigned the in-house training for new account managers for a healthcare company.
Redesigned the presentation used by a healthcare company to orient newly promoted hospital representatives on how to be useful to the hospital.
Created processes for a healthcare company to help its senior leaders raise the performance level of their direct reports while in their present positions, and prepare them for future career opportunities.
Developed and presented a 3-hour session on leadership for an undergraduate management class at Pace University in Pleasantville, New York.
Conducted an organizational assessment for an engineering design company that led to the facilitation of leadership programs and coaching sessions.

Coaching

Coaching, for you, may be an underutilized skill, perhaps because no one helped you understand how to coach.

You may have been doing a great job as an individual contributor and were selected to lead a group of people. By contrast, you could be an experienced people-leader. In both cases, you may never have received formal or informal training on how to lead people, let alone how to coach them.

A certified professional coach from the Institute of Professional Excellence in Coaching, which is accredited by the International Coach Federation, Walt can help people-leaders understand how to develop the skills of their people and achieve the best results by coaching them.

Walt’s Executive Coaching Experience

Worked with eight senior leaders of a federal government agency, guiding them through an interpretation of their 360-degree feedback, and helping them develop action plans to become more collaborative leaders.
Coached the CEO and CFO, along with other members of the senior leadership team, of an engineering company. Helped them see the benefits of adhering to existing operating processes, being more open with each other, and coaching and developing their people to help transform the culture to ultimately bring in more revenue
He helped the CEO of a Big Brothers Big Sisters Agency effectively manage poor performers. Modified a tendency the CEO had in making operational decisions for her staff, helping her to listen more and incorporating her staff’s input on program implementation. The result was better engagement and feeling of ownership among the staff.

How Walt Works with Clients

Uses questioning techniques to help clients understand how their behavior is impacting their actions.
Moves clients to take some action that they are comfortable with to improve their situation and hold them accountable for the completion of agreed-upon action steps.
The client guides the direction of each session.
Provides email support between coaching sessions.
Suggests appropriate development resources.

How Walt Helps You

Provides an assessment of the energy you bring as a people-leader using the Energy Leadership™ Index Assessment. The results will show people-leaders how they typically respond under stress. Walt then works with people-leaders to better channel their positive energy to increase their effectiveness.
Helps people-leaders uncover the real key to motivating and engaging their people, which relieves the stress and allows more time for the people-leader to act and think more like a leader
Shows people-leaders an approach to coaching that develops the skills and competency of their people, making them more independent problem-solvers and productive employees.

Facilitation

The thing that Walt enjoys the most is being in front of a group of leaders and facilitating a session. He influences how classroom participants think about leading people, attempting to change their behavior to get more significant results through people.

Walt’s diverse background allows him to connect well with sales management and managers in all functional areas. His varied experience in many disciplines enables him to connect real-world experiences to classroom examples and activities that help participants apply vital concepts on the job.

Walt’s experience allows him to transfer concepts in highly-competitive industries that offer tangible and intangible services. He brings that same experience to designing learning events and tools that help managers and individual contributors drive business results.

Walt has facilitated more than 1,000 face-to-face and virtual classroom sessions, focusing on developing skills.

Face-to-Face and Virtual leadership sessions

The essentials of leadership
Leading change
Influential leadership
Leading high-performance teams
Building trust
Communicating and listening
Team building
Decision making
Emotional intelligence
Behavior-based interviewing
Getting started as a new leader

Curriculum Design

Walt has designed 1-hour, 2-hour, half-day, full-day, and two-day workshops that help people-leaders more effectively lead, coach, and support individual contributors effectively sell, influence, handle conflict, and become more collaborative.

He has also designed pathways of development to help salespeople become sales managers, make sales managers more productive, and develop sales managers into effective leaders of sales managers.

His Work

Curriculum

Built a training curriculum for Region Sales Directors of a pharmaceutical company to help them develop functional and leadership competency.

Follow Up to Classroom Sessions

Designed tools for several pharmaceutical companies to reinforce coaching and leadership skills taught in the classroom.

Managing People

Setting expectations
Managing performance problems
Delegating
Performance Reviews

Developing People

Coaching
Managing your career
Career coaching
Developing others

Working Well with Others

Influencing without authority
Interpersonal relationships
Collaborating
Resolving conflict

Setting expectations
Managing performance problems
Delegating
Leading Virtually

Designed Custom Face-to-face & Virtual Classroom Sessions

Designed a coaching workshop for a healthcare company using existing video of sales representatives in various scenarios.
Designed and delivered two webinars targeted to Sales Managers that focused on leadership skills and providing new sales representatives with the guidance needed to produce results quickly.
Designed an interviewing skills workshop for a healthcare company to enhance sales manager’s ability to hire salespeople who are the right organizational fit.
Designed a managed market coaching workshop for sales managers of a healthcare company to drive performance with their salespeople in the face of market changes that could negatively impact sales performance.
Designed an influence workshop for sales managers of a healthcare company to help sales leaders be more influential with colleagues and internal stakeholders.

Designed a day-long selling effectiveness workshop for a healthcare company that focused on delivering sales messages that drive customers to action.
Converted a 4-hour face-to-face Time Management class into a 2-hour virtual session has been successfully facilitated to a healthcare company several times.
Designed and facilitated a two-day leadership development program for senior leaders of an industrial manufacturing company.
Designed and facilitated a 4-series program for senior leaders of a credit union to help transform the operating culture.
Designed and facilitated a 1-day workshop to build collaborating and networking skills with internal colleagues for an energy company.
Designed and delivered a 3-hour workshop on what all leaders need to do to develop the skills of their people to drive results.