CEO Bruce Parker’s own leadership qualities had flourished with coaching, so when he took over the US operations of Old Mutual Financial Network he built a coaching culture there. The Company recently received the Southeast’s top award for organizational excellence through coaching. The PRISM Award recognizes companies who use coaching as a business strategy to improve bottom line results. “Executive and team effectiveness soared with the greater sense of accountability, flexibility, trust, and mutual respect,” Parker noted when he reviewed results for the previous three years. Risk-taking can be tough for top-level leaders, but the results have proved coaching a wise strategy:

• employee retention improved and there was a marked increase of hiring from within. OMFN’s 2007 turnover rate was 38% below the national average.
• sales brought revenue growth up nearly 100% over the three years of coaching, from $3.6 to $6 billion.

A merger combining three core business units located throughout the US and blending three distinct cultures went better than expected, had limited attrition and saw the promotion of many internal candidates to higher positions such as CEO, SVP and VP.

“I recognized early on, said CEO Bruce Parker, that in order to be successful I needed to multiply my leadership efforts and engaging with an executive coach is an effective way to do it”

From a pure coaching perspective, says Parker’s executive coach Craig Jones, leadership competencies at Old Mutual Financial Network flourished. In areas such as leading change, employee-manager communication, 1:1 relationships between manager and direct reports and collaboration among cross cultural and multi-generational teams all showed measurable improvements.

Old Mutual Financial Network, founded in 1845, is one of the world’s largest insurers, ranks as a Fortune Global 500 company (#173) and employs nearly 53,000 people worldwide in over 40 countries.

They were selected for the PRISM award from a field of eleven nominees, including Wachovia Bank, Newell-Rubbermaid, CDC, Compu-Credit, Hotel Equities, Goodwill Industries, Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation, MAPS Institute of Keller-Williams, M.D. Hodges and Inter-Continental Hotels Group.

The Georgia Coach Association’s 2008 PRISM awards and conference was sponsored by Lee Hecht Harrison; Coaches Training Institute; RightPath Resources; Maggie Anderson Words That Work; CAT Video; Team Coaching International; Inward Bound; maurgood; Siegel Institute for Leadership, Character and Ethics; Talent Builders; WOW Transformations and Deloitte. For more information go to www.georgiaprismaward.com.