Humans Over Hardware: A Coaching Solution for Leader Wellbeing

In a time where individual apps, artificial intelligence, and machine learning seem to be offered as solutions for every human problem, Magellan Federal puts people first. Our knowledge, expertise, and experience strongly point toward leveraging advances in technology to go beyond connecting people to information and resources. Instead, Magellan Federal focuses on utilizing technology to connect people to people. People perform more efficiently and consistently and thrive in challenging circumstances when they embrace elements that define us as human beings. In just about every professional service area including teaching, medicine, counseling, financial advising, or even legal services, the quality of the relationship built between the service provider and the recipient creates the strongest impact for behavior change.

Magellan Federal has a wealth of expertise in mental performance and has been entrusted by the Army to provide 250+ expert coaches with graduate degrees in sport psychology for over 10 years. Each of our performance experts has the responsibility of coaching our bravest to perform their best when it matters most. Throughout our years of experience working with more than 150 military occupational specialties, we have learned how to efficiently and effectively implement science-based tools drawn from the psychology of human performance and thriving into various levels of leader development. We have found the most successful behavior change takes place when we strengthen the mental performance of mid-level leaders.

The Significance of Mid-Level Leaders

In an increasingly complex and uncertain world, organizations are requiring their frontline workers to take on more demands while not always providing these individuals with resources to ensure they are more resilient to handle the increased responsibilities. Firstline supervisors and mid-level people managers are responsible both for driving the performance and productivity of their team members to meet the organization's missions and for meeting human needs required to ensure the well-being of their team members.

Mid-level leaders are possibly the most valuable people in any organization because of their responsibility for enacting organizational strategy in its most tangible form. These leaders take on “commander’s intent” — the missions, challenges, and problems identified by strategic thinkers — and empower the doers of the organization to take action. Not surprisingly, these mid-level leaders carry the most weight and exhibit the highest level of stress and burnout in any organizational unit.

Solving the People Growth Challenge

We believe that by investing in leader growth and wellness, we can strengthen organizations. Drawing on the success of delivering our specialized expertise in mental performance, we developed a program for organizations to grow their leaders through human connection. We recently launched eMbolden, a coaching program that advances people-leader wellbeing and performance of themselves, their peers, and their team members. We utilize a digital platform to provide an engaging and immersive experience through live group and 1-on-1 coaching sessions, peer and community learning, and curated resources to provide a rich, ongoing coaching experience that results in sustained growth. To date, eMbolden participants report feeling personally invested in and more equipped to invest in their team members. Organizational results are reported in a 24/7 self-service dashboard with filterable data.

Our coaching is focused on three central elements — mind, body, and connectedness — and results in leaders having more clarity of purpose, improved self-awareness and optimism, better ability to work with emotions, and increased belonging. This leader development, in turn, benefits organizations through attracting and retaining skilled team members, engagement, productivity, and establishing a culture of trust. Put simply, leaders feel supported and empowered, driving growth throughout the organization.

Connection Drives Growth

At Magellan Federal, we believe in using technology to enhance our services that continue to put people first. Technology allows our experienced coaches to be available and responsive to leaders regardless of location, curate state-of-the-art expertise within leader communities, facilitate discussion about the real-world application of mental skills and provide continuous expert feedback necessary for true leader development over time. We embrace the accessibility that technology brings us and are excited to have developed a coaching solution that merges the best of both worlds — technology with a human touch — so that we can enhance performance and human thriving for leaders around the world.

For more information, visit mfed.info/eMbolden.

About the Author

Jon Metzler, Ph.D., CMPC® is Senior Director of Human Performance at Magellan Federal, a subsidiary of Magellan Health. He provides strategic leadership to help organizations optimize performance through coaching innovations taught by a highly specialized staff of cognitive performance coaches.

Dr. Metzler has over 20 years of extensive experience providing direct performance psychology consultation to teams and athletes representing many different sports of various competitive levels.

He is a past president and fellow of the Association for Applied Sport Psychology and currently serves as Chair of the Council for Certified Mental Performance Certification® and is a member of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee Sport Psychology Registry. He holds three bachelor’s degrees from Concordia University – Portland, a Master of Arts in Sport Psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Kinesiology with a specialization in Psychology of Movement and Sport from the Pennsylvania State University.