AIIR was excited and honored to recently present Dr. Terrence E. Maltbia its 2020 AIIR Consulting Coaching Leadership Award.

Presented to Dr. Maltbia at AIIR’s Jazz is in the AIIR virtual event, the award recognizes leaders in the coaching field who have delivered extraordinary impact. As the founder and Faculty Director of the Columbia University Coaching Certification Program (3CP), Dr. Maltbia has taught several thousand students the art and science of coaching. Those students, in turn, have gone on to coach thousands of leaders around the world. The multiplier impact his work has had on the coaching community and the world is hard to capture in words.

Dr. Maltbia is a member of the AIIR Consulting Advisory Board, providing a special focus on AIIR’s scientific research, academic partnerships, and overall strategy. He is also an Associate Professor of Practice for Adult Learning & Leadership Programs in the Department of Organization and Leadership at Teachers College (TC) at Columbia University.

“I first met Terry six years ago at the Columbia Coaching Conference, and I remember that the conference blew me away,” said Dr. Jonathan Kirschner, founder and CEO of AIIR Consulting. “It wasn’t just the rigor of the content, or the richness of the presentations, or the thoughtfulness applied to every detail of the conference design. What impressed me most was how Terry harnessed the concept of community to enable greatness. Rolling the clock forward, I feel so grateful to be a part of the Columbia coaching community, and for Terry to be part of the AIIR Consulting community — as a member of the Advisory Board, as a strategic partner, and as a friend.”

Our Work as Coaches Has Never Been More Important

After accepting the award and thanking various parties, Dr. Maltbia delivered brief remarks.

“2020 has been some year, hasn’t it? With the pandemic, social unrest, and economic downturn,”  Dr. Maltbia said. But, he said, in this challenging moment, “our work as coaches has never been more important.”

Dr. Maltbia shared the stories of two of his executive coaching clients — the challenges they had faced working to navigate the extreme uncertainty of the pandemic, how they struggled to balance their work with the challenges they faced in their personal lives, and how coaching through these challenges had been transformational for both.

“I often hear people say, ‘when we go back’ to the way things were before,” Dr. Maltbia said. But while the pandemic will end, “I don’t think we’ll ever go back, because we now have this experience that says, ‘We are more than what was.’ And that is the power of coaching.”

Dr. Terrence E. Maltbia, we are incredibly grateful for all that you have given to us and the global coaching community. Congratulations!