Martha Isobel Lask, Senior Consultant, Liberty Business Strategies

Expertise

Martha Isobel Lask is an executive coach and an organization development consultant with over 25 years experience as a coach, consultant, and leader in private, not-for-profit and public sectors. She has deep expertise in coaching and coaching skills training, group facilitation and leadership development. Martha’s coaching approach is oriented toward expanding individual and systemic strengths. She strives to address a client’s identified areas of challenge within the context of the person’s style, his/her motivation to change, the culture of the system and the business to be accomplished. She uses a comprehensive coaching framework, working on three levels—self awareness, behavioral change, and systemic support.

Clients

Over the past several years, Martha has worked with a wide variety of companies across many industry segments. As an executive coach, she has worked with individuals at: Bristol-Myers Squibb, Deloitte Consulting, Fairmount Ventures, Inc., La Salle University, AACO-Client Services Unit, Cooper Health System, Eagles Youth Partnership, Morgenthal Frederics Opticians, Nationalities Service Center, The Northeast Regional Child Advocacy Center.

Representative Engagements

• Coaching for Improved Leadership: Faced with the complexity of day-to-day programmatic issues combined with larger organizational challenges, the Executive Director of a child welfare agency found herself spending increasing time on staff supervision, including crisis management and problem solving, with few resources at hand to guide or support her. With Martha’s coaching, the Executive Director learned leadership strategies and methods to manage her organization. She learned to look more deeply at her options in a supervisory interaction and make informed choices. Through the coaching experience, she built confidence in her ability to handle problems and improve her effectiveness in managing people. She reports that getting her “internal house in order” has freed up time to build critical external alliances.
  
• Ensuring a Successful Transition: The Pharmaceutical Research Institute of a large pharmaceutical needed to embed a new matrix structure and the corresponding values of partnership, cross functional collaboration and flexibility into its work. In addition, one team within the Institute was undergoing a leadership change as the former leader transitioned from a domestic to a global role. Martha coached and supported the leaders through the transition, helping them to manage significant differences in communication and leadership styles. The experience enabled the transitioning leader to focus on the end goal, meet deadlines with quality deliverables, and make the behavioral changes that would smooth the transition for the team and his successor.
  
• Creating True Collaboration on a Team: The Director of a technical assistance provider faced difficulty managing the internal operations of her organization; she and her top managers could not get on the same page. Martha designed and facilitated a process to help the team work through communication issues and create a set of internal organizational agreements to enable them to act as a unified team in providing technical assistance to the field. Martha’s tools helped the team understand their own and others’ strengths, analyze the assumptions they were making about others’ responses, and communicate effectively with one another. One month later, team members reported “leaps and bounds” improvement in communication. The tools that Martha introduced are being applied in additional situations to keep meetings on track and heighten effectiveness.

Professional Background

Martha became affiliated with Liberty Business Strategies in 2008. Before starting her own consulting practice in 1993, Martha was a Senior Staff Development Specialist at Towers Perrin, where she designed and delivered training programs in client relationship management and collaborated in developing a leadership development curriculum for the firm. Her major accomplishment was the selection, marketing and implementation of a new coaching and mentoring program that was instrumental in changing the company's approach to management. Martha also served as Executive Director of South Portland Neighborhood Housing Services, Inc. in South Portland, Maine, where she created an active private/public partnership that implemented a commercial revitalization program yielding $1.5 million in private property reinvestment and a revolving loan program which reversed housing decline in two neighborhoods.

Education and Training

Martha holds an M.S. in Organization Development from American University (AU/NTL Program) and a B.A. in Sociology from Bowdoin College. She teaches a movement methodology called Authentic Movement to individuals and groups and has developed an innovative approach to enhance consulting and coaching skills using Authentic Movement as a practice field.

Professional Affiliations

Martha is a member of the national and Philadelphia OD Network. She is an avid dance enthusiast, co-chair of the Ellen Forman Memorial Dance Fund Committee, and an advisory board member of the Leah Stein Dance Company.

Martha Lask can be reached at:
Phone: 610-649-3800