Imagine a world where challenges are not obstacles, but stepping stones to greatness. This is where a leader’s passion is ignited by the thrill of pushing boundaries, the joy of unraveling complexities, and the belief that every individual and organization carries within them untapped reservoirs of capability. As a certified Master Facilitator and Coach, Rob Whitfield is a symphony of expertise and facilitation that harmonizes with your business priorities, elevating your agenda to unprecedented heights.
With a portfolio adorned with successful transformations we at CIO Business World interviewed Rob to know more about his experiences and the overall journey.
Below are the highlights of the interview:
Brief our audience about your journey as a business leader until your current position at your company. What challenges have you had to overcome to reach where you are today?
I started in technology coding and testing at a major consulting firm and realized that people’s behavior makes or breaks business results – regardless of the technology being deployed. As a consequence, I became certified as a trainer in Coaching and Neuro Linguistic Programming, and focused on specializing in behavior change and transformation as a management consultant, partnering with organizations like Coca-Cola, General Motors, UK Border Agency, Walmart, Warner Bros., and World Bank Group to deliver a return on investment from behavior change in the workplace.
Along the way, I have helped thousands of teams get the personal and business results they tried hard to achieve on their own, and it’s been an absolute privilege. Over the past twelve years, based in Los Angeles and traveling the world to partner with client teams, I have really been able to hone my craft, deepen our research, and put my skills to the test, coaching some of the most senior executives at Fortune 500 companies, entrepreneurs, board members, and celebrities to truly unlock their full potential as individuals and in the teams they lead.
The toughest but most rewarding obstacle I regularly overcome is to help teams open their minds to new possibilities. Many organizations, especially those who have a long history, find it incredibly difficult to change their cultures and working styles, still reliant on the now redundant hierarchical model of working. We worked with a Fortune 100 company who had planned to take their call centres remote for 10+ years but never did at the fear of losing market value during the change.
When the pandemic happened, we partnered with them and they made that change in a matter of weeks, saving millions of dollars in the cost of physical buildings and boosted staff availability due to eliminated commuting time. Breaking down the barriers of why companies think they can’t do something and helping them move towards something exponentially better is an obstacle, but one that gets me out of bed every day and excited to support clients!
Tell us something more about your company and its mission and vision.
My personal mantra is to ignite a passion for challenge and change so that everyone achieves their full potential. I work with so many teams, executives, and organizations across the world and, unfortunately, see the same patterns of behavior and culture that lead to burn out, executives working long hours, and folks missing precious time with their families. In our applied research with teams, I have refined it into what we call Team Cohesion.
Teams that pull together in service of their north star, have a safe space for crystal clear candor, have peer-to-peer accountability, and a ‘we win as one’ mentality, get exponentially better results in a shorter time, and more joyfully. My team and I coach teams to our proven Team Cohesion mindset using thin sliced practices, which are a toolkit of shortcuts and collaborative tools a team can apply. We constantly see incredible results and I thrive on the opportunity to help as many people as I can. It is exciting to have refined such a winning formula with our coaching; we truly cracked the code to make average teams world class.
For me, holding client satisfaction and business outcomes as priority above all else has helped us build a strong client base. We are so confident in our methodology that we guarantee our work.
Rather than teaching or training, like many companies, we focus on tackling business priorities and coach our clients on how to be successful in targeting what is important to them. We truly advance an organization’s agenda through our expert facilitation and team coaching. Our approach has always been to co-create solutions with our clients; we listen, we flex, and we are agile in our approach to ensure maximum impact. Many of our competitors merely try and force in solutions to problems without really tailoring solutions to the client’s needs.
The best way for us to demonstrate early value and gain clients is to offer our free team diagnostic that shows our prospective clients how their team performs against our benchmark data set. You can try the free team diagnostic assessment here.
How do you build and manage a motivated and effective team?
Building a motivated and effective team is easier than you would think with the right support. We have helped so many teams totally transform from dysfunctional to high performing 10X teams. We have also helped teams go from being good to great; there is always room for improvement.
Over the years, we have built and refined the methodology that makes teams world class. We partner with our clients to accelerate and elevate their results, make their work more joyful, and transform the careers of the people we work with.
One of the foundational blocks that we commence with is shifting the team from a group of folks to a team that cares about each person in the team. When people show up as who they truly are, that gives permission for candor, and this is one of the twelve critical pillars in our methodology that will accelerate and elevate results, joy, and careers. This is the perfect foundation for the team to build on as they work on their own business challenges and we coach to the right behaviors, practices, and tools that will make them world class. I recently gave a keynote for UCLA and talked through these steps – you can watch that section of the keynote here.
Our research institute continues to identify, test, iterate, and apply new practices to enable teams to go further, faster, and more jofylly, and our resource center can be located on our website so check out Redefine Winning to find out more.
Where do you envision yourself to be in the long run, and what are your future goals for your company?
The pandemic really just highlighted a lot of the problems that had been unaddressed for years and taken as the norm. Many companies had plans for the future but never jumped in and started making practical and much needed changes, for fear of falling behind in the market. The pandemic forced everyone out of their comfort zone in a way we’ve never seen before, requiring innovation and new ways of working. Indeed, I wrote an article on how much it enabled exponential change and transformation in organizations. It was scary but also very exciting.
We at Redefine Winning are always evolving and our extensive research always keeps us steps ahead. It’s our job to bring those ideas to the market in service of supporting our clients. We want to be able to share best practices and new ways of working with as many individuals, teams, and organizations as we can to help them have better work life balance, greater enjoyment, broader diversity and inclusion in their teams, and ultimately 10X their goals and results! AI is the next big area and our research project in that space, along with the impact it will have on teams and teaming competencies, is a must read for leaders, managers, and team members alike.
Describe in detail the values and the work culture that drives your organization.
The thing that motivates me and my team is that we know we have a key that can unlock greatness in teams. I’ve spent 30 years working with teams and have developed a really powerful set of tools and techniques to facilitate them through the rough terrain of change and out the other side to a better way of working. Their work lives are more productive and engaging, their results are exponentially better, and their work-life balance is restored. All of this is very easily achievable using the Team Cohesion mindset. When a team develops beyond just co-existing you start to feel the strength from The Power of Team. The same effort put into achieving 10 percent improvement becomes 10X the improvement and results.
