Toma Ramirez Principal, Executive Coach & Facilitator. Group-learning facilitator for Immunity to Change (individual & teams); Conflict Management; and Design Thinking for Visioning & Innovation.
Toma Ramirez is an executive coach, facilitator, and business advisor who brings a special distinction to the client partnership: his own twenty years of successful entrepreneurial and business leadership experience. Having co-founded three businesses, sold one business, and consulted to more than twenty Fortune 500 companies, Toma knows the challenges senior executives face daily in their super charged, highly competitive environments—the challenges that often distract them, complicate their vision, and clutter their paths to effective leadership, performance, and productivity.
Drawing on his keen intuition, finely honed coaching skills, and extensive business experience, Toma—a passionate student of human behavior—connects naturally with senior executives and their teams. He facilitates meaningful conversations that pull back layers and go beyond surface level, revealing truths and insights that lead to as-yet undiscovered and unexplored possibilities for improved teamwork and vast growth. He helps leaders focus and build on their natural strengths to overcome obstacles and turn the corner on impeding dysfunction through authentic self-awareness about who they are as people and leaders. His custom-designed processes and practices inspire breakthroughs to long-term solutions and improved leadership confidence that get executives and their teams on track and on target. Coaching from a place of compassion and non-attachment, Toma is vested in no particular outcome other than to fully support executives and their specific objectives for achieving tangible business results—this is the thought partnership.
One area of specialty is his work in conflict management coaching and resolution facilitation. Here, Toma taps into a specific set of tools and processes to address and manage conflict, with the goal of reducing the high cost of poor communications and resulting lack of innovation and productivity within and across teams. Among his strengths is his natural ability to digest volumes of data and complex situations involving multiple people, and to get clear on the critically important pieces. The process involves knowing what questions to ask and how to interpret reflections, while being mindful of internal discord. He supports individuals experiencing internal or external conflict, but also “stands in the middle” of contentious situations to help those involved reframe conflict into positive, learning opportunities for all involved.
Prior to his career as an executive coach, Toma was an entrepreneur, business consultant, and business development executive. As the founding sales and business development executive for Parson Consulting, Toma played a key role in fast tracking the company’s rapid growth to more than $40 million in revenue in four years. As the founding business development executive at Sequoia Software (MD), Toma was a pivotal player in enabling the company’s IPO and sale to Citrix Systems. Most recently, he co-founded California Clean Technologies, which was sold in 2009, and was a founding executive at two Bay Area technology and professional services start-ups. Over the course of his career, Toma has provided consulting services to Google, PepsiCo, Inc., General Electric Company, United Technologies Corporation, Williams-Sonoma, Inc., Levi Strauss & Co., Texaco/Chevron Products Company, IBM, Coca-Cola Bottling, Diageo, eBay, Inc./PayPal, among many others.
Toma earned his Bachelor of Arts in business management from Georgia State University. He is a certified Integral Coach® through New Ventures West. Additionally, he is certified through Harvard Law School’s Advanced Negotiation Program: Making Difficult Conversations Productive; Harvard University’s Minds at Work Facilitator Training: Immunity to Change (February 2015) and Immunity to Change for Teams (October 2015); and Stanford University’s Innovation Masters Series: Design Thinking and the Art of Innovation (Certificate June 2015). A graduate of The Hoffman Institute (2015), Toma is also trained in Conflict Management Coaching through CINERGY® Coaching.