The fastest way to become a powerful business writer is through one-on-one coaching.
Strong writing skills will help you better lead your team, increase business, save time, be perceived as a trusted leader, and advance your career.
Our individual coaching programs are tailored to match your professional goals. By teaching you comprehensive strategies while working with your actual work documents, we can ensure you will understand the tactics and frameworks to tackle any future writing challenge. You will master business writing.
A custom coaching plan focused on improving your weaknesses and reaching your specific career goals.
Virtual coaching sessions that can be scheduled to fit even the busiest calendar.
I'm writing to share a milestone. The director of my division asked me to edit a memo being sent to our entire company. This was the same guy who told me my writing was hurting my career before coaching.
Thank you for the gift of clarity.
I knew my business writing had to match my strong business skills to earn a major promotion. After coaching, I write faster. My writing is much more organized. It clearly reflects my leadership and vision.
And, I won the promotion.
Our custom coaching programs are fully individualized and based on your writing requirements and skills. But, all coaching consists of three phases.
The first phase identifies your goals as a business writer. The second phase creates a custom coaching plan after reviewing sample documents. The third phase is the implementation and individual coaching sessions.
Each coaching engagement starts with identifying your goals as a business writer. To be successful, it is important we exactly identify the outcomes you want from coaching.
Goals often differ depending on your industry and personal strengths. If you have a specific writing challenge, we can discuss this on a quick consultation call. Once we have identified your goals, we will create a custom coaching plan that will lead you to business writing mastery. You can view a real clients coaching goals in this case study.
Here are a few example goals from other coaching projects:
Improve clarity and simplicity of complex information
Write with executive tone and voice
Build a process to storyboard strategic messages
Spend less time re-writing
Improve grammar
Convey complex information to division and team
Be perceived as a strong writer to achieve promotion opportunity
Our coaching programs are best suited for professionals who are ready to focus on improving their business writing and for whom writing is an essential part of their work.
To create a coaching plan, we first compare your goals with your current strengths and weaknesses. You will start your coaching engagement by completing a personal assessment. Your self-assessment helps us to understand which areas you feel need the most improvement.
We will discuss your goals thoroughly and also review recent documents you have written to identify improvement opportunities. These documents will help us tailor your coaching to focus on skills that are most relevant to your career.
We will address your most pressing document requirements, but coaching will enable you to write anything at work with skill and ease.
Each coaching plan is unique. It is an individualized plan based entirely on your writing requirements, current weaknesses and strengths, and goals.
Download a custom coaching plan case study.
After we have identified your strengths and weaknesses we create a coaching plan with major topics for each session, moving sequentially to hone the particular writing skills you need. We have found that the most effective sessions are 50-minutes long.
Each coaching plan is custom created depending on the number of coaching sessions you choose. If you are not sure how many coaching sessions you will need to reach your goal, we can help guide you on a quick free consultation call.
The two phases — Identify Goals and Create Coaching Plan — are essential and the foundation of coaching, but we achieve these quickly. In your first coaching session, we begin the work of learning to write efficiently.
Schedule a call with us to see if coaching is a good match for you.
We never share client information or business information. We're happy to sign any non-disclosure agreement required.
Each individual coaching sessions include instruction, actual document review and discussion, exercises, and follow-up comments and resources to reinforce the new skill. Each session focuses on sequentially learning a new skill that you can start applying immediately.
In these sessions, we will teach you proven strategies and tactics to become a more effective professional writer.
Coaching sessions are a lively and illuminating dialogue between you and the coach. One-on-one instruction allows us to tailor the examples and lessons to your industry and goals. They are an excellent time to ask specific questions that you may have from recent communication challenges at work. Each session builds on the previous work to help you become a skilled writer.
Sessions are also a time to review the previous impact of actual writing. We know you are busy. We will never ask you to write any pretend exercises. Instead, we weave your real writing tasks in with goals and the coaching plan. Coaching is fully based on your actual work.
Coaching sessions can also be used to mentor key documents that you are writing at work. These documents are a great place to implement the strategies you have been learning. We will resolve any specific document questions and provide recommendations.
Using online meeting software means you can join a coaching session from anywhere in the world from the comfort of your office or couch. On the call, we can easily share our screens to review presentations and writing.
Your goals, documents, tasks, and progress are all tracked in our project management software. We will create a private project where we will track your progress to keep your goals current and allow for feedback and collaboration from other coaches as needed. We stay organized so that you don't have to.
An executive writing coach helps you maximize your particular writing strengths, identify areas of opportunity for greater impact, and become more effective in your work.
Executive business writing coaching is an intensive, individualized, guided engagement that leads to business writing mastery.
Your knowledge, tone, confidence, language, and clarity is conveyed in your writing to your entire organization and clients. The focus of coaching is identification and correction of your particular writing issues, and ensuring your documents drive business objectives.
Hire a coach if you want your writing to advance your career.
Six months of custom coaching, integrated fully with your job requirements.
Ten sessions of custom coaching based on your real-time writing at work.
Online course with instructor feedback and one coaching session.
This program ensures that writing is a career asset for you and that your writing projects dynamic leadership. Communication strategies, along with full support and editing, are also provided. This is ideal for the professional for whom writing is critical or who is making a significant career leap and needs deep support.
You will receive:
This program includes:
Identification of your individual goals and writing requirements.
A custom coaching plan.
Recommended materials and document observations, which are emailed to you after coaching sessions to address skill gaps, based on coaching observations.
Review and correction of interim documents discussed during sessions (concept maps for planning, drafts, and final review).
Deep integration into your job description and work requirements.
Review and support for all work documents.
Full guidance on strategic communication issues and leadership writing.
This program ensures that writing becomes a career asset for you, so you can project solid leadership, and are able to write any work document required.
It includes ten individual coaching sessions, scheduled as flexibly as you wish to match your document requirements at work. Also included is email support and review of interim coaching documents.
This program includes:
Identification of your individual goals and writing requirements.
Ten 50-minute individual sessions, live via web meeting, focused on actual work documents.
Recommended materials and document observations, which are emailed to you after coaching sessions to address skill gaps, based on coaching observations.
Review and correction of interim documents discussed during sessions (concept maps for planning, drafts, and final review).
This cost-effective option includes an online self-paced course with written instructor feedback and one live one-on-one coaching session.
It identifies skills and gaps, provides instruction and resources, and includes written feedback on your writing. One live coaching session is scheduled after the course to discuss your writing and an actual work document.
This program includes:
Identification of your coaching goals and writing requirements.
Online practicum course, in which you plan, draft, and edit an actual work document with instructor feedback and guidance.
Written feedback on two writing exercises.
One hour of live coaching with your instructor.
My team and I would love to help you write with ease and skill at work. Since I founded Instructional Solutions in 1998, we have helped thousands of individuals improve their business writing in customized courses. We’ve coached scores of executives to business writing mastery.
As business writing experts, we help professionals convey complex information in writing with clarity and engagement.
We have had the privilege of working with some of the top companies in the world, and my work has been cited in the Wall Street Journal online, Business Week, CNN, and college textbooks.
We enjoy helping coaching clients break through long-standing writing blocks and inefficiencies and experience the fun and power of writing with purpose and ease, which translates immediately to deeper respect at work.
You'll be matched with one of our highly credentialed business writing coaches. I oversee all coaching engagements but each coach is deeply skilled, highly credentialed, and has both theoretical and pragmatic training experience. Coaching is a one-to-one mentored relationship so we want to ensure the fit is right for you.
Our business writing coaching sessions are highly engaging and pragmatic.
After taking the coaching ... I was able to produce a piece of writing without much trouble and in a third of the time that I usually take using the tools and process that I learned from the class. Towards the end of 2021, I needed approval for an out-of-band salary adjustment in order to retain critical talent.
I also noticed that I had much less anxiety about the writing process because I structure to lean on. In the end, the request was approved with no questions ... I credit the writing to enabling her to make a decision quickly.
Whatever insight you had to match me with Grace, was spot on. She is a natural-born teacher with the technical expertise to boot. Her advice is minimalist, precise, and always on point. And she does it all naturally, with the poise and the grace befitting her name.
I came into this coaching expecting a technocrat who would help me decipher my ESL brain. She did that too. But more importantly, she helped me see the unsuspecting voice hiding in plain sight.
Schedule a quick consultation with Mary Cullen to discuss individual coaching programs. This call will help you understand if we are a good fit for your needs.
We'll talk about the types of documents you write, the types of improvements you are hoping for, the role you play at your organization, and any other unique considerations. We will make a recommendation based on the information you share and provide next steps.
Use the calendar on the right to find a time to share your business writing coaching needs.