History

Helping shape the leadership coaching profession

For the past 25 years, Praemia Group’s senior partners and associates have played a prominent and recognized role in the development of the leadership coaching profession. Jim Selman, Vince DiBianca, Dave Laveman and Don Arnoudse have worked with an array of executives and managers on substantial business issues, leadership challenges and personal issues.

Firsts in Coaching Business

Jim Selman, Praemia’s Advisory Board Member, is a seminal leader in defining the theory and practice of coaching and a noteworthy contributor to the field.

Jim helped identify and apply the principles of coaching used in athletics to the business world, and many of these initial ideas are still widely used today. In 1984, he co-founded Transformational Technologies, the first major organization designed to broadly apply the art and practice of coaching to the business arena. The company’s network of 70 franchised affiliates and several hundred coaches consulted to thousands of organizations in America and Europe. Transformational Technologies affiliates were trained in the key principles of coaching before training and certification bodies like the International Coach Federation (ICF), the International Association of Coaches (IAC) and Coachville were formed.

In 1987, Jim and his colleagues, including Praemia’s Vincent DiBianca and Dave Laveman, organized the first major public event to introduce coaching to the business world. They brought together three renowned sports coaches of the day (Red Auerbach of the Boston Celtics, John Wooden of UCLA and George Allen of the Washington Redskins and Los Angeles Rams) for a live video event. In a satellite broadcast to 4,000 people across the United States, these extraordinarily successful coaches explored how coaching could make a critical contribution to the sustained success of a business enterprise. During the ensuing years, Jim, Vince and Dave continued to adapt and apply what they learned from athletic coaching to professional coaching in the business world.

In 1989, Jim became one of the first practitioners to offer extended coaching training to business executives through the widespread distribution of his video series Coaching, Beyond Management. That year, he also wrote a seminal article with Roger Evered entitled “Coaching and the Art of Management” for Organizational Dynamics. In 1998, Jim created the first academic coaching and leadership university degree program to be accredited by a national government (Argentina). Coach U licensed the program materials to Phillips in Singapore and T. Fitzgerald in Australia.

Firsts in Coaching Executives and Teams

In the early and mid-1980s, Praemia’s Vince DiBianca demonstrated the validity and effectiveness of coaching leaders during difficult business transitions. As co-founder of the DiBianca Berkman Group, Vince built and managed a fifty-person firm specializing in leadership development and cultural transformation and using executive coaching as the core modality of their approach. Vince coached CEOs and the executive teams of many of America’s largest companies on a host of business, team and leadership challenges. In the 1990s, he brought that coaching experience to entrepreneurs, start-ups and smaller enterprises.

During the 1980s, Praemia’s Don Arnoudse worked with information technology leaders in large corporations to better manage “the human side of technology” and more effectively implement technology-driven change across their organizations. In 1988, he co-authored the book Consulting Skills for Information Professionals. He founded the firm Arnoudse + Associates, which CSC Index acquired in 1989. In the 1990s, Don became a leader in developing and participating in the emerging networks of professional coaches around the globe.

From 1988 to 1992, Praemia’s Dave Laveman pioneered the application of leadership and team coaching to the highly regulated, science-based pharmaceutical industry. Dave developed a powerful hybrid approach combining leadership coaching and team development with rigorous process management. Through coordinated coaching-intensive interventions across a dozen drug development projects, he successfully demonstrated coaching’s efficacy by reducing the time to major milestone of drug development teams by 32%. As an officer with CSC Index in the mid-1990s and then as a change management partner with Accenture, Dave Laveman pioneered the application of leadership and team coaching to large complex sourcing initiatives.

In 1993, CSC Index’s CEO Jim Champy and the late Mike Hammer published Reengineering the Corporation, one of the most successful business books in history. Reengineering the organization and its processes was the easy part: the real challenge lay in changing the mindset and mental models of the executives and managers. Individuals had to confront giving up territory and power to possibly improve the enterprise’s efficiency. To add this missing element of change management to their offer, CSC Index acquired the DiBianca Berkman Group. Throughout the 1990s, Don Arnoudse led CSC Index’s change management practice during that company’s pioneering work across the globe in business process reengineering.

With a new focus on reengineering processes and people and an increased interest in learning about major change, coaching gained greater acceptance. Other major consultancies looked to CSC Index’s high-profile success and began highlighting leadership coaching as an integral part of change management. Coaching began to transition to a full-fledged profession, and coaching universities began to emerge.