Christa Folkers has a remarkable talent to provide powerful support for motivation and performance leading to successful and profitable teams. She often inspires others with her ability to identify gaps in leadership development, training and coaching. She is also well versed in creating positive outcomes with hiring practices, process improvement and overall organizational/team strategy.
Prior to co-founding the Strengths Consulting Group, Christa successfully managed large teams in sales, staffing and recruiting at the executive level. She is a graduate of Accomplishment Coaching, and specializes in leading clients to use the Clifton StrengthsFinder as a tool to facilitate powerful coaching and training techniques focused on the individual strengths of team members.
With 20 years as an executive leader, coach and top producer in the staffing industry, Christa has experience in all the facets of leading highly productive sales, recruitment and support teams to reach and exceed their goals.
One of the CEOs she worked for commented:
“Christa Folkers was my peace of mind and partner when I arrived here. She was the first person I thought of to join me in the development of strategy and in the refinement execution for the organization. She came to us, independently assessed the situation, made recommendations, effortlessly influenced stakeholders (new and the most tenured) and made a tremendous impact. She is smart, dynamic, results oriented and just plain lovely. I could not have made it through my first year without her. I tried many times to convince her to join me permanently. Whoever gets her is one lucky leader.”
Christa loves to spend time with her 2 teenagers and husband. Her passions are reading, yoga and traveling. She’s wise, insightful caring and committed to quality. Christa is a talented, no non-sense executive that cares deeply for her those she works with.
Strengths: Maximizer, Relator, Individualization, Connectedness, Significance
Christa@strengthsconsulting.com
To contact Christa for coaching, email us at info@strengthsconsulting.com
Christa’s Additional Expertise:
- Coaching: A unique approach to coaching for performance – Christa has created multiple KPI/sales/statistical reports that provide team members fact based information on their performance – creating powerful groundwork for individual coaching. She teaches individuals self-accountability strategies by analyzing performance; creating motivational tools geared toward each person’s individual strengths and challenges. Finally, she facilitates realistic goal setting and continued coaching and support around reaching and exceeding performance goals.
- Emerging Leadership Development: Equipping emerging leaders with tools and confidence – Christa is passionate about on-boarding new and emerging leaders with coaching and training around developing enhanced listening skills, delivering feedback in a way that creates positive momentum. Her goal in every role is to leverage leaders by creating succession planning that allows for growth of the team and the individuals. She has created countless ideas for career pathing, and is a visionary in helping people see their potential as a leader.
- Leaders as Coaches: Leaders learning to coach; not just train and direct – Christa’s passion in leadership development is teaching leaders to act as a coach to their team members – which shows a statistically significant increase in both engagement and productivity. She provides a safe learning environment for leaders to learn to become active listeners, and to guide employees to finding solutions and motivation intrinsically versus following rules and job descriptions. Christa imparts years of wisdom on the differences between coaching, directing, problem solving and mentoring – all skills needed in creating excellent leaders.
- Training: Finding the hidden gaps – Christa has created and delivered multiple trainings based on identifying where the gaps are through listening to team members and analyzing data. After creating customized training tools, she also creates easy follow up and strategies for self-accountability for both leaders and individual team members.
- Process Improvement: Connecting the dots and creating efficiencies – Christa’s experience in on-boarding newly acquired companies as a leader with AMN; and implementing multiple Managed Services Partnership strategies allowed her the insight needed to identify where process efficiency is lacking and how to create solutions. Her passion is to look at a process from start to finish and determine what are the “easy” and short term efficiency fixes; and outline longer term strategies for growth and sustainability.
- Core Values and Strengths based Team Building: Leveraging differences, finding similarities – Christa has implemented strengths-based training with multiple leadership teams, sales teams and individuals. She uses the Clifton StrengthsFinder as a tool for team building, conflict resolution and increased performance. She has facilitated guided core values exercises to bring a team together in identifying what the core values of the organization are, and how to strengthen team commitment and performance around the identified core values.
- Strategy Sessions: What’s next? How do we grow? – Christa has facilitated multiple strategy sessions to help teams and organizations determine how to leverage their current strengths and identify areas where there is opportunity for growth within the organization. Her method of brainstorming; being inclusionary and listening for underlying challenges; gives her the unique ability to identify opportunities for growth and change.