Helping Careers Take Wing

Written by Dianne Molvig Tuesday, November 29 2011

Snapshot: Gwen Jewett, CEO, Pilot Coaching
Gwen Jewett knows what it’s like to arrive at a career crossroads. By the time she was 37, she’d already been the executive director of a 12,000-member national nonprofit health care organization for 14 years. She felt she’d reached a professional plateau, and although she still loved many aspects of her job, she knew it was time to seek a new direction.

Today Jewett guides others who are on a similar search. As owner of Dallas-based Pilot Coaching, she helps women and men who currently are in leadership positions to explore “identity issues.”

In that process, her clients learn to discover their own answers to key questions: Who am I in the workplace and in my personal life? Am I expressing my core values, or have those fallen by the wayside without my realizing it? Have I lost myself a bit? What am I missing?

Jewett holds an MBA from the University of Dallas and is a graduate of Coach University. She’s married and has a 7-year-old daughter.

Womenetics: How did you manage your career transition into coaching?
Gwen Jewett: After I left my job at the association, I had a couple of things I wanted to try. One idea I toyed with was opening what I pictured as a very cool retail antique and contemporary furnishings store. So I went to work for a local furniture store to learn the business. I needed to put myself in that environment, which is what I encourage my clients to do now.

The other avenue I looked at was life/career coaching, a new concept at the time. I hired a coach of my own so I could learn from her. Then I contacted friends and former co-workers and told them I was looking for a few guinea pigs. I wanted to work with up to five people for 60 days at no charge so I could get experience and they could give me feedback. Five people signed up right away.

That’s how I got started. I was doing two things at once: working at the furniture store and coaching clients. That experience helped me to decide that, yes, coaching was something I wanted to do. Then I signed up for training through Coach University.

It was a very deliberate approach. I was earning income at the furniture store while I was also evaluating the coaching option. I’ve read different rules of thumb that apply when you’re starting your own business. Some say you should have at least three months’ expenses put away. I’m way more conservative. I had to know I could live for two years if my business didn’t produce anything. I was unmarried at the time and solely dependent on myself for income.

Womenetics: When you were first considering leadership coaching as your new career, why did it appeal to you?
Jewett: When I was executive director at the association I spent a lot of time on the phone with volunteers to help them learn how to become a committee chair, how to motivate people, and so on. And sometimes they’d start talking with me about their career or their life, asking me for advice.

I was very careful about that. There’s a line between therapy and coaching. I gave feedback more so than advice. It was just something that seemed natural for me. One of my co-workers said she’d heard about this new profession called coaching, and she thought it sounded exactly like what I needed to do.

But even so, I was a bit skeptical at first because it was a new profession. I couldn’t quite wrap my head around the legitimacy of it. So I hired my own coach and learned a lot.

Womenetics: What have been your biggest challenges in running your business?
Jewett: I think it was Marshall Goldsmith who wrote an article I once read about being focused on what you want to do. He said you have to be ruthless about what you will not do that would interfere with what you want to accomplish.

I find it fun to have my own business, but I’m sort of a knowledge junkie. I love reading and finding new ideas. It’s easy for me to go, “Oh, that’s a great idea!” But you have to stay focused. That to me was the biggest challenge. I went through an intensive branding class that helped me with that.

I’d say my biggest challenge now is marketing. Every day I get invitations to marketing webinars. But I realize I can get so focused on marketing that I lose focus on doing things that connect my clients with me.

Womenetics: What’s the story behind your business name?
Jewett: My dad’s hobby was flying. When I was a child sitting in the backseat of the plane, I thought he looked in control. So the word “pilot” came to me in thinking about a name for my business.

A lot of coaching companies have sort of breathy names. They talk about [her voice goes to a whisper] “following your dreams, flying on a rainbow …” I thought that is so not me. I do like the dreaming aspect, but I’m also very practical. For my business name, I wanted a solid word that says leadership and preparedness.

Womenetics: Where might your company be in, say, five years?
Jewett: I have a fantasy of creating some kind of leadership institute for young people. I started my executive director job at 23. When I look back now, of course, I realize I did some stupid things because I was inexperienced and didn’t have the people skills.

Today we have a lot of young CEOs – such as Mark Zuckerberg (of Facebook) and others. They have to develop leadership capabilities so much earlier. I’d like to teach young leaders basic leadership skills, as well as how to maintain their integrity. What are their values? What do those mean? And how do they hang onto them when they’re bombarded with so many pressures that make it tough to keep their integrity?

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Dianne Molvig is a Madison, Wis.-based freelance writer who writes regularly about business management, financial services, law practice, consumer education, and other topics.