Coaching Yourself to Leadership: 5 Key Strategies for Becoming an Integrated Leader

What would happen if a highly respected and well known business coach provided you with a new and revolutionary model for leadership that could help you achieve the happiness, productivity and fulfillment at work you are striving for? It would change your life. O'Brien's themes--be authentic, visionary, emotionally intelligent, an assertive communicator and connected to others through relationships and alliances--are covered in-depth in separate chapters. Exercises, tools and specific guidance are also provided to help you turn the information presented into everyday practices.

Ginny O'Brien is an executive and corporate coach, specializing in leadership development and women’s advancement. In 1998, she founded The Columbia Consultancy, a leadership development coaching firm. Ginny’s coaching model encompasses five core areas of development: authenticity, vision and strategic thinking, emotional intelligence, assertive communication, and the ability to build and nurture strategic relationships. She has worked with managers, directors and executives — both men and women — from small, medium and large companies. Her corporate clients include Thomson Financial, Avery Dennison, Omgeo, Texas Instruments, VHB, Inc., and Bingham McCutchen, LLP.

A skilled facilitator and workshop leader, Ginny has led leadership and career development workshops for over 100 organizations, including Salomon Smith Barney, Shell Oil, Xerox, Eastman Kodak, Fidelity Investments, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Texas Instruments, Verizon, Chubb, Viacom, and McKinsey & Company. She also conducts leadership and career development teleclasses.

In addition to Coaching Yourself to Leadership: Five Key Strategies for Becoming an Integrated Leader, she is also the author of Success on Our Own Terms: Tales of Extraordinary, Ordinary Business Women (John Wiley, 1998) and The Fast Forward MBA in Business (John Wiley, 1996). She was a contributing author to Winning in the New Europe: Taking Advantage of the Single Market (Prentice Hall, 1992) and her articles on business intelligence and career strategies have been published in major magazines, including Working Woman, Self, Women in Business, Business Woman, Business Woman Canada, Planning Review, London Commerce and The Journal of European Business.

Ginny was a member of MIT’s organizational learning pioneer group that developed learning histories and she edited two of the first corporate learning histories written. She also publishes a monthly e-mail newsletter on leadership and career development that has approximately 1,500 subscribers. She has been featured in major newspapers and magazines, including O, The Oprah Magazine, and is listed in the International Who’s Who of Professional and Business Women.

During her career she has held management positions in communications and public relations, and has worked for small businesses, nonprofit organizations and major corporations. Ginny has also taught organizational communication, writing, and leadership courses on both undergraduate and graduate levels. She holds a summa cum laude BA in psychology and an MS from Boston University's College of Communication. She is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coach Federation and a Certified Professional Behavioral Analyst (CPBA) who is qualified to use DISC, Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, and Benchmarks assessment instruments.