About Patty Beach

I'm Patty Beach. My class is alpha prime. I’m an executive coach and leadership development expert at my own firm, True North Programs.

First of all, when I started MSOD I was an earth scientist. I was a geologist. Organic geochemist actually. My career had kind of started moving into strategy and business development. I knew that I was more interested in people than whether we found oil or not or what we were doing with our maps. It's how we talked about what we were doing like the geologists and the engineers and stuff like that. That was really interesting. And then eventually I just made my way over to organizational development. I just could tell that if I ever lost my job at that company that I would need to have some sort of a degree to get a job doing what I was doing in that other company because they don't hire geologists to do what I was doing by the time my career transitioned over. I was in my late 30s when I switched over. 

I think that my legacy I really feel that I have done a hybrid of leadership development, organizational development, and coaching. When I came into MSOD I learned about systems. So when I work with my leaders I work with them on personal mastery like who they are, how they show up, what they stand for, where they're going with their lives and the things that they do to be more conscious as a leader, being more mindful, and really thinking about themselves and where they're taking their lives.

Then I work with them on an interpersonal level one to one like how do they build relationships so that they have these really clean and clear relationships in their organization, and then I work with organizational mastery. How do they come and create an organization so that the organization lives after they leave there as leaders?

I feel like that whole structure that I use in my work I got from MSOD, and I feel like it really benefits my clients because I can work with them on all of these levels. Sometimes it's about them and how they show up, and they're getting in their own way, and other times they're in a system where the system... This one person can't really fix it. They need to get advocates and really develop relationships to break through things and make things happen.

I also feel like a lot of the leaders I work with, some of them are CEOs in companies or maybe they're team leaders, the head of a function, that using these best practices in organizational development, creating this organization where their visions are manifested, but it's a collective vision. They start off as leaders bringing an idea, but then it gets stronger because people come together and work it, and they really engage them so that it's held by the people that have to actually do the work and they own it.

I feel like all the work here at MSOD I don't know if I could ever do the work I do at the level I do had I not had this experience from the different courses they take us through that basically put us through those paces of self. Also, we learn self, and then you do team, and then you do organization and then transorganization.

I've actually been able to do transorganizational development work between the Department of Energy and Navajo Nation. It's being able to understand that transorganization is not the same as organizational development. Just that perspective has been so helpful. Really, it's been wonderful.

I'm moving forward over the next 10 years. I'm closing in on writing a book right now, and so when I went to MSOD I wanted to write a book, and I thought I'd turn my master's thesis into a book. That was 20 years ago, so it's like long overdue to write a book. But I feel like I've taken a lot of the things I've learned in organizational development and MSOD, and I've tried to kind of simplify it because managers don't have the luxury of all the time we spend to learn these concepts.

So I simplify a lot of models down into easier to digest and remember kind of models and things like that. Then I bring them to my clients. I want to take that body of work that I've done where I've been able to make a contribution to help leaders accelerate their ability to learn these skills and best practices in leadership development.

Then the other thing is I've developed a model called The Versatility Factor, which is about balancing masculine and feminine strengths in leadership and I've created online assessments, and I've been collecting data. I really want to prove that the leaders that have this balance in masculine and feminine energy have better outcome, like they have better performance or they feel better about their leadership.

So I'm gathering this research information. I've been doing this work for quite a while. Actually that was what I did my master's thesis on many years ago. I want to take that body of work that I started in earnest at school where they made you research it and write your thesis and do that study and then make it more accessible now to the general public. That really is what I'm hoping for in the next 10 years.

If all dreams come true, and hopefully by August I'll be done with that first book. That's my life... I won't eat my hat, I'll eat my house if I don't finish that because it's been chasing me for a while.