Iris Lee Bagwell offers coaching and leadership development to a wide variety of clients in corporate, nonprofit and political settings. Iris has over forty years of experience working with individuals, pairs, teams and organizations with a focus on building relationships that work. She has had the opportunity to work with outstanding thought leaders like Diana Smith, Chris Argyris and David Kantor. She is a frequent trainer in the field of organizational learning.
As a coach, Iris is uniquely qualified to help her clients tackle the kind of challenges that trouble today’s leaders. Her work combines the best thinking from psychology and organizational development, creating a tailored approach that enables her clients to grow beyond their present constraints. Working with individuals, relationship pairs, and leadership teams, she helps clients understand the interface between their environment and their character structure, and to see how they inadvertently contribute to the outcomes they find most problematic. Iris’s work is both insightful and pragmatic. Clients begin to see previously “invisible” options and to efficiently make choices that improve performance. Previously troubled relationships and teams begin see each other as vital learning partners. Her ability to work in a productive and thoughtful way with powerful emotions, effectively tying these intense feelings and opinions to bottom-line results, is often cited by her clients as one of the single most powerful interventions in their professional lives.
Starting in 2004, Iris became increasingly involved in the political process. In 2008, she began to conceptualize an offering now called Campaign Leadership Coaching. This innovative offering pairs Iris’s experience as a leadership development coach with her more recent campaign experience to create a vibrant, powerful program that can reduce staff turnover, accelerate the pace and quality of collaboration and decision-making, and dramatically decrease the amount of the time the Campaign Manager has to spend dealing with difficult relationships that arise.
As a trainer, Iris focuses on learning. Training remains the best way to convey ideas but it is becoming clear that simply providing training alone doesn’t insure the integration of new knowledge into existing skill sets. Integration comes from training combined with high quality, reflective practice over time, which can address idiosyncratic obstacles to deep integration of knowledge. Iris offers a program that delivers integration (learning) by combining training with coaching.
Iris’s corporate clients are found in high tech, professional services, finance, academic, healthcare and pharmaceutical areas. Her nonprofit clients include pioneers in education reform, innovative political campaigns, and other organizations with an emphasis on entrepreneurial leadership.
Iris holds a Bachelors Degree cum laude from Tufts University and a Masters Degree in Counseling Psychology from Northeastern University in addition to extensive post-graduate training. She is senior faculty at the Action Design Institutes.
