Ines Bazdar/Shutterstock.com
The Coaching Case
company implemented necessary but
painful cost-containment measures.
Their anxiety was quantified by a
disheartening employee engagement
index of 61.6 percent.
A Winning Strategy
DJ Mitsch, MCC,
ICF Global Past
President
DJ is a thought leader in
the coaching profession, an
award-winning author, one
of the first 25 coaches to
receive ICF’s Master Certified
Coach designation and an
experienced Mentor Coach.
Prior to entering the coaching
profession, she spent two
decades as a broadcast
executive. In 1994, DJ and her
husband, Barry Mitsch, cofounded The Pyramid Resource
Group, which provides
coaching to many of the
world’s largest pharmaceutical
companies, medical nonprofits
and health insurance
companies, as well as
telecommunications, aerospace,
broadcasting and professional
sports organizations. In 2013,
DJ launched the Health Care
Coaching Institute to serve
the growing need for coaches
well-equipped to serve leaders
in the health care industry.
She is the author of “Team
Advantage: The Complete
Coaching Guide for Team
Transformation (Pfeiffer/
Wiley 2010) and the editor of
“Coaching for Extraordinary
Results,” part of the “In Action”
series edited by Jack J. Phillips
(American Society for Training
and Development Press, 2002).
12 Coaching World
Over the last two decades, team
coaching has emerged as an
extension of Executive Coaching,
empowering leaders to work
with their teams in new ways
and transform team-building
into culture-building. Since 2012,
the field sales force for Sanofi’s
North American Pharmaceutical
division has been reaping the
benefits of team coaching
delivered via The Pyramid
Resource Group’s proprietary
model, Team Advantage™: The
Complete Coaching Process for
Team Transformation.
A Challenging Climate
In late 2011, North American
Pharmaceuticals, Sanofi employed
5,000 people and was generating
annual revenue of roughly $10 billion
USD. Anne Whitaker had just been
named the division’s president at
a time when the organization as a
whole faced great challenges. Some of
Sanofi’s best-selling drugs were just
months away from going off patent,
while other products faced stiff
generic competition. Employees were
weary from recent mergers, ongoing
restructuring, and attempts to integrate
cultures and processes while the
Although Anne was concerned
about market share and profit, she
also recognized that sustainable
improvement and innovation starts
with employees who find meaning
and satisfaction in their jobs and take
pride in their company. She brought
in The Pyramid Resource Group to
coach a select cadre of first-line leaders
tasked with seeding change leadership
capabilities and coaching teams as
Sanofi prepared to shift to a more
patient-focused sales model.
Accelerating Change
Pyramid’s Team Advantage™ model
is a 16-week process that fast-tracks
team cohesiveness and performance
by asking members to create a game
plan worthy of their time and energy.
It has the built-in measures of a game
with business goal attainment and
encourages creativity and play.
Over the course of the first four
months, a team of 14 professional
coaches from Pyramid provided
extensive training in change
leadership and team coaching to 25
first-line leaders during rigorous,
weeklong sessions. These change
agents had an average tenure of 10
years and were recruited for a twoyear special assignment: to build
an internal-to-Sanofi capability for
change leadership, team coaching and
continuous improvement.
The driver for embedding these
capabilities centered on the ICF Core
Competencies, so the mentoring and
partnership with Sanofi’s change agents
were the most important aspects of
this rollout. Any good facilitator can
complete a team-building event, but the
team coaching that takes place after
the goals are in place requires advanced
coaching skills—especially listening
for the team’s voice. Professional