The Boss: Sharon Daniels of AchieveGlobal, on Her Love of Coaching

We moved to Immokalee, a farming community not far from Naples. My father managed the agricultural supplies store. I attended the local school, where all the students, through high school, were taught on one campus.

The summer after sixth grade, I wanted to earn some money, so I opened a baby-sitting service in our house. I watched over four, and sometimes more, children a day. At 14, I started working as a waitress at a nearby family-owned restaurant after church on Sundays and during the summers. Back then, no one even thought about a minimum working age. The pay was $1 an hour plus tips.

The next fall, I got a job in a packing house, grading tomatoes — whether they were too ripe or too green — to earn money for holiday gifts. I was soon promoted to boxing tomatoes. I had other after-school jobs, working in a men’s clothing store, in billing at a water plant and at the local bank, which had an elevator — now that was something for our one-stoplight town.

After I started college in 1972, first at the University of South Florida then at the University of Florida in Gainesville, I worked at the bank in the summers, mostly filing checks. At the end of the second summer, I was promoted to teller, which was a bigger deal then because the whole town ran on cash. On Fridays, tellers were handling as much as $250,000 in cash to employers to meet their payrolls.

I majored in education and after graduation moved to Orlando. But I couldn’t find a full-time job, so I briefly worked as a substitute teacher. A local bank called and offered me a full-time job. I worked there 19 years, starting in Orlando. Over the decades, the bank would merge and become part of a larger network, Southeast Bank, and I was able to realize my passion for coaching others when I joined the bank’s training department.

I met my husband, David, who is a C.P.A., when we were working in Orlando. We married in 1980 and had three children: two girls and a boy. Seven years later, we moved when David took a job in Tampa.

In 1991, I joined Kaset International, which marketed customer service training. In 1998, Kaset merged with Learning International and Zenger Miller to become AchieveGlobal, to help companies with leadership development, sales effectiveness and customer service. The next year, 1999, I headed sales for the new company in the Eastern states.

After a year, I took a job as president and chief executive of Communispond, a communications training company in New York. Four years later, in 2004, I returned to AchieveGlobal. The business was rocky after the 2008 recession began, but we are now in more than 40 countries, with a staff of 600 people. Our parent company is the training and events organizer Informa, which is traded on the London Stock Exchange.

We still supply 50 percent of our training in the classroom, but companies are increasingly seeking flexible solutions, like combining learning in class with videos or mobile and tablet applications so employees can learn at their own pace.

Over the years, I’ve been able to use my skills for volunteer work in crisis counseling and pregnancy counseling. And my coaching and mentoring skills have come in handy in raising our children. I made a list of tasks they should master by age 18, including making their own doctor appointments and mending their own clothes. They seem pretty self-sufficient now, so I guess it worked.

As told to Elizabeth Olson.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/jobs/sharon-daniels-of-achieveglobal-on-her-love-of-coaching.html?partner=rss&emc=rss