Today we’d like to introduce you to Dr. Jayne Gardner.
Dr. Jayne, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My story
I had been a performance coach for 24 years when I finally found my place in the business world. I had started out early in my career working at a psychiatric institute where I quickly realized that the therapy world had two ways to help people: medicate them or talk them to death. Neither one worked so I set out to develop a system, a personal growth process, that did help.
My system is brilliant and has worked for over 4,000 people but that is not the story I want to tell. It worked successfully for an entrepreneur and helped him improve his marriage and get past his feeling of being stuck in building his soft -ware business.
It worked so well that he decided he wanted to offer this process to his employees.
My story starts when Joel, the founder of a soft- ware company called me and asked me to play Wendy, the doctor in the Showtime series, Billions who was the coach. Just like the hedge fund company in Billions did with their analysts, Joel wanted me to be on site and provide a coaching culture for his employees.
At first, I hesitated as I had a successful private practice and was doing well. My background in
performance coaching for over 20 years provided the expertise needed to elevate Joel’s vision and I eventually said yes. He wanted to prove that prioritizing people alongside profits pays off significantly. He told me he was ok to pay for this out of his own pocket but he hoped it would improve performance and eventually raise his bottom line. But it was an experiment for both of us. We just hoped it would be enough growth that it would pay for my salary.
We were delighted and surprised at how much employees enjoyed this personal growth process I used with them. Psychology in business? Therapy in the office? Well, it wasn’t therapy however, in the process they took, we did go back and ask questions about the employees’ early life. We were wondering if they related to their bosses in the same pattern as they did with their dominant parent? We also wanted to give them what we felt was missing in most working environments these days: A place where people felt valued, like they were important to the company and became also invested in the mission of the company giving more meaning to their work.
We found that giving them this perk where they could talk about their own problems to someone did make them feel like they belonged at work. The process improved Joel’s people problems, like would be in any workplace. We found that because the process helps people uncover their old patterns in relationships as they were growing up and teaches them how to change into more positive ways to be together in the workplace, performance did go up!
But, we were surprised at how much it improved their performance and how much happier they appeared to be.
Joel and I decided to hire an outside journalist to come in and interview his people as to what really helped them. We found the following results:
1. His employees said they were happier in mood at work and at home.
2. A significant number of them said it raised their confidence level and made them want to come to work in the morning.
3. And they reported that their emotional reactions had calmed down and that when they did face a conflict or someone irritate them at work, they now had the ability to pause and not over react.
Many of them told me personally that having a coach to go to had changed their lives and they never wanted to work any place else!
But what surprised us the most was the even though Joel’s company had been valued at 3M, 2 years later, a private equity firm arrived at his door and offered him 30M! He accepted and now he is playing alot and we are putting this culture in other companies.
I felt it was a story worth telling.
Our book we wrote about this experience is called: Best Job Ever.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
It was daunting at first to ask employees to take a personal growth course at work! They felt that if they went to talk to a coach at work, it might not be confidential and might get back to their boss. We also started out with individuals and eventually coaching in teams but realized we had to make the teams gender specific because of the private nature of discussing someone’s early life.
So it took a while to talk a handful of people into being the early adopters. But after they took the process, they loved it so much they turned on the other employees to the fact that it was safe and well worth the time.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I am a professional coach but my education is a PHD in psychology and family. I worked for the first 20 years in family counseling and then jumped into specializing in business coaching. I found it very discouraging as to the improvement rate seemed so slow. So I decided to create my own process for personal growth called High Performance Breakthrough (HPB). It was so successful working with families and individuals that business people started asking me to install it in their companies as part of their culture.
Now, I travel to companies every day and take their employees and leadership teams though my HPB course. I help them create a culture where people want to come to work, where they are treated fairly and have a way to go if they feel they are being treated poorly.
I love what I do now with companies as I always admired my father so much and really deep down wanted to be successful in business just like him.
I work specifically with owners of small businesses who want to grow their companies and are frustrated with people problems and the slow journey to success. I love to see the look on their faces after I install my HPB process into their culture and they no longer have people problems and their employees become loyal, want to come to work and love what they do. Then, the boss, or founder does too.
Any big plans?
I will write another book someday, a fifth book. as I love to write.
I am still working in my 70’s but just can’t stop as I love it so much.
I am looking forward to life itself and becoming more and more aware how much people enjoy finding out more about themselves. My process has two parts. First, Who am I? and the 2nd part is: Why am I here?
Helping people uncover their purpose meets the purpose of my life: To help people be happier at work by discovering who they are and why they are here.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.drjaynegardner.com
Image Credits
myself Dr. Jayne Gardner
