Testimonials

I’ve been honored to serve hundreds of leaders across a number of companies, and I’ve included a select list of those companies below, as well as some of votes of confidence from these leaders. See my LinkedIn profile https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandyschwan for additional endorsements.

I am the president of a luxury women’s apparel company in NY. Sandy has served as an Executive Coach for me for about 22 months at this point. She has an amazing ability to listen to complex work situations and to ask good questions that allow me to see new insights. She shares materials and ideas from other industries that are very helpful. I feel energized and empowered after a session with Sandy. I would recommend Sandy to coach any executive at any level including a CEO.

Sandy has been an invaluable resource in enabling our senior staff to plan implementation of a significant strategic change in business strategy. We appreciate Sandy’s role in our success.

Sandy is always interested in how people are going to be impacted by change. When she walks into a meeting where everyone is sitting with their arms folded, she finds ways to engage them.

Sandy has assisted our organization on a number of assignments, primarily in the areas of business strategy development, change management and organizational change. She has effectively interfaced with a wide variety of senior executives, each with unique personalities and perspectives, throughout the organization. Sandy has repeatedly demonstrated an uncanny ability to effectively interface with those senior executives, establishing open and candid communication, in both individual and group environments. She has been able to effectively filter and consolidate the inputs, to enable her quick diagnosis of the team issues and development of an effective and impactful plan. Her recommendations have proven effective in breaking through stumbling blocks affecting the team’s ability to practice strategic thinking, develop collaborative action plans and produce measurable results.

In addition to Sandy’s technical and strategic ‘know how’, Sandy has outstanding professional and leadership qualities—she is highly motivated and committed, with the highest level of integrity. She also brought unparalleled enthusiasm to her work. Sandy’s spirit of enthusiasm was one of the primary success factors of this program. Sandy worked long and hard to build strong relationships, resulting in a large network of supporters across Finance that she used as sponsors to leverage and promote the program. Sandy … was vigilant in developing a succession plan, training and ‘grooming’ individuals to move the program forward once her contract was complete. Sandy was very well-liked and respected by individuals at all levels in the organization. Her work was exemplary!

Thank you again for your excellent presentation this morning. Your message shared a complex topic in a highly relevant and simple way. The participants unanimously agreed! The comments that we heard at the end of the session were positive and many. They valued hearing your presentation and participating in the conversations at their table. Your stories were just the right information for the participants to relate to and value. The session was a huge success!

Sandy is truly one of the finest professionals I have had the opportunity to work with in my career.

Sandy Schwan is an outstanding consultant and has my highest recommendation.

I was able to work closely with Sandy and watch her in direct contact with peers, superiors, and customer stakeholders of varying capacities. Several things struck me as making her particularly effective. First she immediately engenders a confidence and competence when introduced. You immediately know that she is taking charge of her responsibilities and outcomes. Your confidence continues to grow as she demonstrates her ability to quickly clarify and establish the operating parameters of your engagement and mutual success. She has a direct and concise demeanor that immediately makes you believe that your trust is well placed. She then turns this same focus and directness to her team, where she is never ambiguous about her commitments, your objectives and or your role in those outcomes. To me this makes working in such projects a high confidence experience. You never fear that she is less than at-the-focus of any activity related to her objectives.

Sandy built this [Global Finance Competency Development Program, including training, change management, knowledge management, communications, policies to support 2,800 Finance professionals globally] program from scratch, by engineering the strategy, people, process and technology to foster knowledge sharing, and built the framework for a true learning organization. In addition to building the infrastructure to facilitate the exchange of knowledge (one of the organization’s first intranet sites), Sandy developed a pervasive program to build a culture of knowledge sharing across our global organization (through various programs to reward and incent knowledge sharing, change behaviors, foster an environment of teaming and collaboration, etc).

I was immediately drawn to Sandy’s warmth and authenticity upon meeting her in my Northwestern University Master’s course. Throughout the course, Sandy’s interpersonal savvy, strategic business intuition and engaging facilitation style empowered me to expand my knowledge, shift my perspective and hone my abilities, better enabling me to fill the Director of Learning & Development role I have today. Several years later, my relationship with Sandy continues to be a source of energy and guidance for me in my career.