Senior Vice President, General Counsel, Chief Sustainability Officer & Corporate Secretary, CALLON PETROLEUM CO/DE
Testimonial - Michol Ecklund
http://www.newberrycoaching.com - Michol Ecklund, Deputy General Counsel of Marathon Oil, shares her experience working ...
About Michol Ecklund
Michol Ecklund, then deputy general counsel at Marathon Oil, described her experience working with executive coach Nina Newberry in a 2016 testimonial. Ecklund said she met Newberry through a mutual philanthropic interest and later engaged her as a coach when she was considering a career transition. She stated that Newberry helped her set goals, prioritize tasks, and develop a framework for approaching difficult conversations with colleagues. Ecklund reported that the coaching engagement resulted in a more balanced approach to her professional and personal life, with less stress and improved delegation. She said she would engage a coach again and recommended coaching for others facing significant change or seeking to optimize their current roles.
Transcript (8 segments)
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Michol Ecklund0:00
I'm Michol Ecklund, and I am celebrating this month my 13-year anniversary at Marathon Oil Company. I currently hold the position of Deputy General Counsel. I first met Nina Newberry, I think, seven or eight years ago when we had a mutual philanthropic interest and got involved in a similar organization, and stayed friends with her over the years. When the time came about a year and a half ago that I was interested in engaging a coach for myself, I immediately thought of Nina, gave her a call, and started working with her on a more official capacity.
As I contemplated a coaching relationship, I wasn't sure exactly what that looked like, what the time commitment would be, and just how I would work with that person and how I would know if that investment was going to be worthwhile in the end. So Nina and I entered into some exploratory conversations where she helped educate me on what her role as a coach would be, learn what those benefits would be, and talked very specifically about how we would ourselves measure our progress throughout our six months. I found the whole engagement to be very successful.
We mapped out a path of some goals that I wanted to achieve and a logical process for attacking those, what made sense to embark upon first and what we might tackle later, rather than trying to improve everything all up front. It played out in a way that built my confidence and helped me make those incremental day-by-day changes that at the end of a six-month engagement I could really see a step change in how I approached my job and the impact I was having.
One of the things that really stands out in my mind that Nina helped me with and helped me work through was how to have some difficult conversations with people that I was still getting to know in my new role. She helped me create a frame of reference and a tool that I still use today as I approach a conversation where I know the other person and I likely come to the conversation with different viewpoints and different ideas of an outcome. It's a tool to work through, knowing why engaging in that is the best thing for me and for the company, and a way to approach that that is comfortable to me.
For me, one very tangible takeaway from my work with Nina is an improved ability to prioritize the tasks that are on my plate in any given day, and that includes both professional as well as personal. We can each find ourselves at times potentially overwhelmed with what we feel we need to do. When I worked with Nina, I was at one of those crossroads making this big change. The work that used to be on my plate and how I used to approach my job to some new responsibilities, first I felt the weight of both on my shoulders. I worked through with Nina a way to think about and prioritize tasks, a way to take advantage of all of the resources and great talent around me, and delegate more things both in my personal life and my professional life. That has resulted in a healthier approach to life, a more balanced approach, and less stress at the end of the day.
I think one group of people that can really benefit from Nina and her coaching skills are folks that are in a stretch opportunity. That's where I found myself when I first called Nina. Someone that needs to stretch themselves out of their comfort zone, change how they approach their work and what their responsibilities are, and put themselves in perhaps uncomfortable situations for them. What Nina really helped me do, she was very affirmative in her coaching approach, help build my confidence, and help me build my own brand in a new circle of influence in a way that made that much more comfortable for me and much more quickly than I think it would have happened with me on my own, trying to constantly stretch myself into a new role and that new circle of influence.
One of the other takeaways I have from working with Nina is that she takes big long-term and strategic goals and breaks them down with you into very tangible, day-to-day changes in your activity. It made it very comfortable that at a time that I was starting to feel a bit overwhelmed, we talked at a pretty tactical level about things that I could change tomorrow and goals that I could have over the next week. That helped me digest this new world and these new opportunities and responsibilities in a way that when I look back six months later at the end of our coaching engagement, I could see a significant difference in my influence, how I approached my work, and my ability to drive strategy that on day one seemed like a real challenge, but by breaking it down and changing something small each week, it rolled up into a meaningful change for me.
I absolutely would engage a coach again, both from a personal level if I find myself in a new situation or facing a new challenge. I have also talked with some team members about perhaps a collective engagement of a coach to help drive our team's performance to another level. I did benefit greatly from it and think that everyone can benefit from it, whether they're in a significant change position or even just trying to optimize their current position in their day-to-day activities.