why coach

While we’re glad to include credentials and accomplishments to establish credibility, as in many website “About Us” pages, we will focus in this space to tell you about our focus and our offerings to you.

What We Are About

The Six Sigma Coach Workshop arises from a commitment to Six Sigma over the past six years. During the implementation of Six Sigma at Alstom in Europe, it soon became apparent that, given the widely dispersed operations across several languages and cultures, we needed a common and focused way to support people working within the Six Sigma initiative.

To meet this challenge, we created two support mechanisms. One was a Community of Practitioners in which all Black and Master Black Belts attended quarterly retreats to share lessons learned. Second, we designed and taught a formal program for all belts on coaching skills.

We quickly discovered that people involved with our Six Sigma initiative needed relatively little help learning and applying the DMAIC/DFSS/LEAN methodology itself. The real need was a way to enhance members’ coaching skills to support their activity in teams, to help them foster their own relationships and the relationships of their coworkers, and to help all involved stakeholders accept change initiatives.

We designed and developed a workshop to teach basic coaching tools, techniques and models and created real-experience Six Sigma case studies and activities that would give participants an opportunity to apply their coaching skills within the Six Sigma environment.

Our participants awarded us the highest praise for the workshop. They found their ability to offer excellent coaching was at least as transformational within our organization as the results we gained from the Six Sigma projects.

The three-day The Six Sigma Coach Workshop we are offering now is an outgrowth of this experience. We believe an established coaching structure greatly improves the acceptance and implementation of change initiatives and overall results and success of a Six Sigma initiative. One of our participants said: “I was as fired up and energized in the last hour of the fourth day as I was on the first hour of the first day.” We believe you will come away from this workshop with enhanced coaching skills and share our enthusiasm for coaching as a value-added activity to your organization’s Six Sigma initiative.

About Us

C. W. Russ Russo is a certified Master Black Belt, recently retired from Alstom, AG, a heavy engineering company located primarily in Europe but with 75k employees and locations around the world. Alstom provides high speed trains, such as the famed French TGV, ships, including the Queen Mary II to Cunard and various large cruise ships and military vessels, and turbine and generator power equipment.

During his tenure at Alstom, Russ supported mobilization of the company’s Six Sigma initiative, established structures to support achievement of 24-month financial goals, and personally coached 50 Six Sigma projects to close. He coached 14 Black Belts and more than 20 Green Belts to certification in nine locations within five countries.

Russ also has been an ASQ Certified Quality Manager and a certified ISO auditor. He has been a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Examiner, and has served six years as an examiner, team leader and judge for the Kansas Award for Excellence. He has authored two books focusing on meeting Baldrige and ISO 9000 standards, has published numerous articles in professional journals, and has spoken at national professional conferences most recently as the invited opening keynote speaker for the opening session of the ASQ Six Sigma Roundable in Ft. Lauderdale, September 14 and 15, 2006.