At Droste Group, we recognize that it is vitally important for you to select a coach you connect with to get the most out of your engagement. That is why we have strategically assembled a diverse team of leadership coaches. As part of a regular blog series that we call “Coaches Highlight,” we will introduce the members of our coaching team and give you some insight to help you connect with the coach who is just right for you.
Meet Mary Beth Weigel
Mary Beth Weigel started her career path to coaching in a surprising way—as a quality and assurance leader in the technology industry. Even without a traditional background in technology, she had the advantage of understanding products from a client’s perspective, and she possessed communication skills ideal for translating “technologist speak” into language end-users could understand. When tasked with building her team, Mary Beth chose to use the agile versus the prescriptive approach, a framework that later became a foundation in her coaching approach.
Mary Beth began her consulting career by helping companies formulate a clear understanding of their needs and then develop teams to meet those needs. She later had the opportunity to join the leadership team of a Midwest technology consulting firm that focused on bringing the right people and processes together across project management, business analysis, testing, and overall quality management. As vice president, Mary Beth’s focus was the training, development, placement, and coaching of consultants from entry to executive leader levels. In this role, Mary Beth became an expert in the agile framework as her role required her to build teams that could become quality-assurance and testing teams for hire.
It was while working with a leadership coach of her own, assessing the next step in advancing her career, that she came to the realization that most of her self-fulfillment came from helping clients to build high-performing teams by recognizing individuals’ strengths and self-organizing to deliver the end product. After concluding that coaching was her opportunity area for success, Mary Beth became a full-time certified leadership coach.
Mary Beth’s philosophy to coaching is “step back, get clear.” She helps individuals and teams step back from the day-to-day aspects of their roles to find and address gap opportunities for success.
Mary Beth starts her coaching engagements by “taking the temperature” of her coachee, asking them questions about why they want coaching and what they expect from it. Mary Beth believes it is important for coachees to be open-minded about coaching and to understand that coaching is not intended to “fix something” but to help identify individual strengths, understand the environment, and determine the right fit for success. Mary Beth often will say to a coachee, “You are like a deck of cards, and coaching is helping you make sure you are playing the right hand at the right time.”
Mary Beth has more than 20 years of experience providing individual coaching, team coaching, and consulting services for organizations pursuing transformative change initiatives such as Agile Transformation, Business Process Optimization, Customer Engagement and Relationship Management redesign, and Delivery and Quality Assurance process improvement. She is adept at coaching technical and business leaders to facilitate and support self-organizing, effective teams. She is experienced in project and team assessment and the development of optimization planning, training, and coaching.
Mary Beth is a certified Scrum Master, Certified Product Owner, and Agile Coach who provides Agile coaching and training to help business leaders, IT/technology teams, and organizations implement, transform, and realize the full benefits of the Agile methodology to allow them to tap into their full potential.
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If you’re interested in setting up a coaching experience with Mary Beth or any of our other amazing coaches, email us at info@drostegroup.com. Leadership coaching is one-on-one development, focused on behavior change to improve overall performance and effectiveness. Leadership coaching is just one of the many services we provide. To learn more, visit www.drostegroup.com.
