Karen Scussel, Executive Director, Child Advocates of Silicon Valley
At Child Advocates of Silicon Valley, being strength-based is a core principle. Bob, a former Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) himself, offered to assist our staff with honing our coaching and communications skills. His unique knowledge of the work we do, his expertise in management coaching and consulting and his gentle, positive approach have brought tremendous value to our organization. For the past year, Bob has delivered training sessions, with guided practice, enabling our team to become more adaptable to changing and challenging interpersonal relationships and situations. Bob continues to make a major contribution to our agency and individual growth, for which we are greatly appreciative.
I attended several classes led by Bob and found his style to be most effective: he encourages engagement, creates a safe environment, drives participation, is extremely knowledgeable, and well prepared. As a consultant, Bob worked with me to develop and deliver a customized training for my annual global team meeting of 24. He interviewed me and developed a workshop with emphasis on accountability, trust, and collaboration. Our survey showed that he had a major impact and helped contribute to my employee survey results: I improved my rating by 10+ points in each area. Bob was also my own leadership coach in our corporate recognition program this year. He has been great about supporting and challenging me: holding me accountable for progress. He has great resources and suggestions, but never leads or directs me – he lets me go where I need to go!
I had the opportunity to collaborate with Bob, during the course of my leadership roles at ProMatch - The Silicon Valley Chapter of Experience Unlimited. Bob provided us excellent training and development consulting. His guidance and coaching helped strengthen our team-building efforts and revamped both the content and delivery of our job seeker coaching workshops. We ensured the retention of the newly-learned skills, by emphasizing our experiential learning model that strongly encouraged skills-practice in simulated "live" settings. Bob's fundamental contributions to our organization made a real difference in the quality and effectiveness of our workshops!
Andrea Sutherland, Sutherland Learning Solutions
I had the pleasure of working with Bob on multiple projects while we were working on a corporate Learning and Development team. Bob consistently brought creative energy and joy to the team. As an instructional designer, I frequently consulted with him when creating learning experiences. He is laser-focused on learner outcomes, adult learning principles and training that impacts the business. I would work with him again in a heartbeat!
Christian Vescia, Compliance Training and Communications at Visa, Inc.
Bob is a talented learning and development professional. He makes good things happen for individuals and teams. I worked with Bob at Symantec, and discovered he is energetic, creative, and brings a growth mindset to any project or initiative with which he is involved. Bob was quick to recognize and champion the potential for an Agile project mgt. approach, to deliver more value to the business. He is a gifted facilitator, using candor, powerful questions, and humor to promote insights and foster learning. Bob always maintains his focus on the desired business results of any event he facilitates. We collaborated often, most recently on the development of a team leadership workshop. He is a pleasure to work with and brought a wealth of insights to the workshop design based on his deep understanding of what works best in the classroom. If you have the opportunity to work with Bob as a learning and development specialist or coach, I recommend him highly