Follow Follit

Follow Follit

MANAGEMENT by Mark Gordon | Managing Editor

Evelyn Follit has spent most of her working life defying stereotypes. The latest: Proving career coaches can be a great asset for any executive.

After a 35-year executive business career that's taken her from New York to Brussels to Fort Worth, Texas, Evelyn Follit realized she was really good at one taboo task: Getting other Type A executives to think deeply about their personal goals, as opposed to solely sticking to what's good for the company.

The difference between those two goals, Follit realized, was subtle, yet sublime. An executive who mastered both could ultimately do more for himself, and his company.

"This is very difficult for C-suite people," Follit says, referring to CEOs, CFOs, COOs and other chief executives. "If something doesn't go the way they want, it's a feeling of utter failure."

Follit believed in the concept so much, she decided to make executive career coaching her second career when she retired to her Tarpon Springs home in 2005. And now, in a crowded field, where just about any psychologist, self-styled business guru or plain old advice-giver can call themselves career coaches, Follit stands out.

For starters, Follit, 61, works her new job through experience culled from a resume that includes leadership roles with market research firm ACNielsen, engineering company ITT and IBM.

Her last full-time corporate job was with Fort Worth-based electronics retailer Radio Shack, where she was a senior vice president in charge of the company's human resources and information technology departments.

Follit, who reported directly to the company's chief executive, was the first woman in Radio Shack's 80-year history to rise as high as senior vice president.

She also brings a board's eye view to her self-titled executive coaching firm. In addition to her second career, Follit has made increasing the number of women serving on corporate boards across Florida a personal mission, an effort she leads by doing: Since leaving Radio Shack, Follit has taken board positions with several prominent companies, including Bradenton-based retailer Beall's, Jacksonville-based grocery chain Winn-Dixie and St. Petersburg-based research firm Catalina Marketing Corp.

Follit can even speak from personal experience when talking to clients about one of an executive's most essential skills: Risk-taking. Indeed, Follit's hobbies over the years have included racing Porsches and motorcycles, sports she picked up from her dad and her first husband. In her younger years, she even rode a motorcycle across England. (Follit also broke her foot once, when, in a freak accident, it was crushed by her bike's kickstand.)

While Follit still drives Porches, it's mostly for getting around, not racing. And she's given up the motorcycle for somewhat tamer sports, such as windsurfing, sailing and kayaking. She even plays the occasional round of golf.

Says Follit: "I do all the guy stuff."

Dramatic results

Follit's true value as an executive career coach, though, can be seen and heard in the executive halls of several large companies across Florida. Tampa-based power company TECO is one.

At TECO, Follit works with Dee Brown, the company's vice president of customer service and regulatory affairs. Brown, who was seeking someone to help her streamline her career and personal goals, interviewed several coaches before settling on Follit last year.

"My expectations were completely different than my experience, but in a positive way," Brown says. "She's terrific."

So good, that other TECO bosses took notice, of both Brown and Follit. For example, Brown earned high praise from her direct supervisor, TECO president John Ramil, at her most recent annual review. Ramil told Brown she was making "remarkable progress," especially considering the customer service facet of her job was a recent addition.

Meanwhile, Follit began developing a following of her own at TECO. Other executives, including Ramil, have gotten to know Follit during her regular visits, where in addition to seeing Brown, she stops and chats with just about any executive seeking advice or help.

The process that led to such dramatic results for Brown and Follit's other clients can be described as painful simplicity. Follit starts with a pair of homework assignments that, on the surface, seem pretty easy: First, a client has to create a pie chart of how his or her life's time is cut up, with slices for work, family, hobbies and everything else. Next up, the client must write a one-page essay focusing on three life-defining moments.

What sounds easy, Brown and the other clients have found out, is actually not so simple. The exercises are mentally draining, forcing the executives to think about what they have sacrificed to get where they are, not to mention what they will have to sacrifice to get where they think they want to go.

"It's hard to do," Follit says. "It's a eureka moment."

Follit tops off the exercises by conducting a "soft 360 evaluation" with each client - corporate lingo for asking colleagues and staff to evaluate the executive, and then have him or her answer the same set of questions. These answers tend to be eye-openers, such as one high-powered executive who responded that it was difficult to meet his goals because he believed he was underpaid.

A chance to fail

Under Follit's system, the homework answers only bring more work. The next step is another one that sounds simple on the surface: She asks clients to come up with clearly defined goals and then create an action plan based on the results of the exercises.

Follit though, says just about every executive she's consulted with, even ones on an informal basis, trip over this task. "Chief executives come in and want to do too much," she says.

One client she consulted with started out with more than 80 goals on his action plan. Follit, on the other hand, says executives should start with more like three solid goals.

The next part of the process involves another taboo subject. This time, it's teaching executives that it's all right to be wrong and to fail, even in a public way - a close cousin of taking risks. Follit says when a top executive visibly tries and fails at something, it could ultimately turn into a positive because the rest of the company could feed of the experience.

"Give yourself a break," Follit tells her clients. "Give yourself a chance to fail."

The final phase of Follit's coaching process is the actual work. Follit treats this part as seriously as the research phase, setting up a strict e-mail and meeting schedule to monitor progress. One area many clients are looking to improve on at this point of the process is in work-life balance.

Brown, for instance, said 85% of her pie chart was devoted to work, with only a portion of the remaining 15% going to family. Brown, who is single with no children, says Follit has "forced me to remain accountable" through the regular check-ups.

Once executives get past the initial fear-of-change aspect to this part of the program, Follit says this phase is actually pretty easy. She adds: "Often we find that letting go of a lot of what they're currently doing actually makes them happier and more effective in fulfilling their desired roles."

'A unique executive'

Follit's career goals weren't always wrapped around helping other executives reach their potential. A native of New York City, Follit's first passion, in high school, was studying math and physics. She even won some grants from the National Science Foundation.

Follit studied math in college, too, earning a bachelor's degree in the subject from the City University of New York in 1970. She later earned an MBA from Pace University, just outside New York City.

While Follit liked the learning process in figuring out complicated equations, she truly found her stride at her first big corporate job, with computer titan IBM. After six years at the company as a self-described techie, Follit earned a promotion to the finance department, where she worked in a series of jobs, including product pricing and running a new plant opening.

Follit looks back at IBM as the place where she first realized there was a way to combine her interests in technology and coaching others into one high-level management job. This could be done, Follit thought, by simplifying both areas into easily identifiable goals that can also be easily monitored. It was a similar process to what Follit uses today in her executive career coaching business.

But Follit wasn't able to officially put that realization into action until the late 1990s, when she began working for Radio Shack. At first, she was only running the human resources division. But within a year she was promoted to oversee the information technology unit as well.

"Evelyn is a unique executive - she has in-depth experience leading human resources, technology and finance organizations," Radio Shack's former chief executive and chairman, Leonard Roberts, said in a 2005 press release announcing Follit's retirement.

Follit has been recognized outside of Radio Shack, too. In 2003, for example, she was named one of the 50 most powerful people in retail/IT by Executive Technology magazine. And in 2004, she was named a co-recipient of the Society for Information Management's CIO of the Year award.

But, befitting an executive career coach, Follit says she's fonder of the relationships she built up with Radio Shack's other executives of the late 1990s and early 2000s - an alumni group that now meets once a year to reminisce, including a 2007 gathering in Tahiti.

"The breadth of challenges [at Radio Shack] were all-encompassing," says Follit. "But I had the most fun I've ever had in my entire career there."

While working at Radio Shack in the late 1990s, Evelyn Follit was assigned the job of overhauling the company's Internet presence. To get the job done, she utilized a five-part action plan she had developed throughout her career.

The five steps can be a guide for any executive trying to accomplish a big goal, from overhauling a company division to starting a new business line. The steps include:

• A champion: This role has to be filled by someone who is energetic and passionate. Someone who can see a final product others don't see;

• A vision: The most important part of the vision is to keep it simple. Every employee should understand what's going on;

• A communications strategy: This is the best, if not the only, way for the champion of the project to get across the vision of it to the rest of the company. Follit says it's important to make sure a two-way communication process is set up, so employees can have their questions and concerns answered and heard;

• A healthy corporate culture: A natural follow-up to the communications strategy, this essentially means to be sure to communicate openly, honestly and frequently with every employee. It might be an old business rule, but it's also one many businesses neglect;

• A strategic plan: First, see having a vision. But more importantly, a plan must exist in document form, Follit says, and be comprised of clearly defined actions and goals.

REVIEW SUMMARY

Who. Evelyn Follit

Industry. Executive coaching

Key. An important piece to Follit's program is to teach C-suite executives that it's acceptable to fail or make a mistake.