About
Unlock your potential through self-awareness.
Build Your Alliance exists to help individuals and teams identify their unique differences, name them, and then be able to effectively communicate, compromise, and cultivate an environment where people can navigate openly with trust and resilience.
Our coaches have been trained by the Co-Active Training Institute (CTI), the #1 professional coach training school accredited by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and who can administer accessible assessments such as Everything DiSC, Gallup’s Clifton Strengths, EQi 2.0, EQ 360, and Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team.
This strong foundation creates a baseline for you to launch from by better understanding yourself and your full team, allowing you to open lines of communication that weren’t there before.
OUR MISSION
Build Your Alliance’s mission is to help individuals and corporations learn to define and embody their values and to be effective team members by establishing a common vocabulary leading to clear communication.
THE COMPANY
Coaches who embody the methods they teach.
Each coach at Build Your Alliance lives the values they learned at CTI and more broadly from ICF and have a thorough understanding of implementing a strong foundation of coaching principles. This can be supplemented further through the assessments we offer. Our team bases our work on leveraging strengths, resourcing appropriately, creating a culture of acceptance, and allowing all voices to be heard. We work to help you create dynamic, diverse, and safe environments, engaging talent committed to the organization’s vision, purpose, and mission.
OUR VALUES
At Build Your Alliance, we value self-awareness, transparency, continual learning, and joy.
Listen to Steven’s Story on a Recent Podcast
After experiencing a major panic attack while on a work trip, Steven listened to his body and got help to understand what was not working in his life so he could turn things around. As a guest on Nicole Colwell’s The Corporate Expat Experience, hear Steven’s story of the work he did to move from a successful career in consulting to owning his own business that allows him to live out his values each day. Find the podcast links below to listen to his story and the wonderful things Build Your Alliance does for it’s clients.
Podcast
Steven Urban
FOUNDER
As a coach and community builder, Steven brings more than 20 years of experience in transforming organizational cultures through growing compassionate leaders and team members. He is a dynamic talent developer and executive coach, working with individuals and teams from a broad spectrum of corporate and personal backgrounds.
Steven spent more than two decades of his career at Accenture (over 5 of them as a Managing Director), where he led multi-million dollar transformational programs that impacted tens of thousands of global employees to create new ways of working and new community cultures. His last 4 years allowed him to create a new offering around human resilience, manage a leadership and development practice with a $30 million book of business, and contribute to the development of Accenture’s first Global Health and Well-Being Strategy impacting over 700K employees.
As the founder and leader of Build Your Alliance, Steven focuses on the joys of daily life and how those can bring individuals more success, both in their careers and at home. He finds his own joy in experiencing new cultures through travel, spending quality time with a core group of friends and family, including his dog, Sophie, and trying new restaurants.
Whether you’re a C-Suite leader for a Fortune 100 company or a small business owner trying to maximize your personal strengths, or if you are a large company or a small company wanting to help your teams build trust so they can achieve more, Steven and his team will meet you on your level.
“When I hear, ‘You are only as strong as your weakest team member,’ I counter with, ‘We are stronger when we concentrate on our cumulative strengths.’ Everyone possesses strengths. If you do not take the time to realize what those are, you miss the opportunity to accelerate your team’s success while you waste time documenting what someone cannot do.” - Steven Urban
Jill Gibson
COACH & CORPORATE EXPERIENCE DESIGNER
Jill Gibson, Executive Coach at Stanford University and the Principal of Talent Development Partners, has led and consulted to organizations in multiple stages of growth. As a futuristic thinker, she shapes the dynamics that drive organizational growth, establish leadership, and create happier employees. She is an expert in leadership models and assessments. She creates talent and leadership strategies to expand leadership practices, as well as help organizations thrive. Results driven, she is deeply passionate about assisting people to reach their peak potential and success.
Jill is an executive in Leadership Development, Organization Development, and Learning. She has been consulting for Fortune 100 companies, in the digital services, financial services, and medical industries for 18 years. She led an inclusion and diversity program for a large organization, which received a #3 Rank in Fortune Magazine’s Best Workplaces for Diversity list. Early in her career, as a banking financial analyst and credit underwriter, she developed sharp business acumen and a strategic mindset.
She holds a Master of Science degree in Organization Development from the School of Management, University of San Francisco, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Legal Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. She has completed all course work at the Co-Active Training Institute and is working toward her International Coaching Federation certification. She is certified in Korn Ferry Leadership Architect Competencies, DiSC, Clifton Strengths (formerly StrengthsFinder), Myers Briggs MBTI, Situational Leadership II, Strong Interest Inventory, FIRO B, and has experience using branded leadership assessments such as TruScore, Birkman, Hogan, and Extraordinary Leader.
What brings Jill joy is time with her family, friends, and athletic challenges. When she’s away from a meal with family or friends, she is battling it out on the tennis court, skiing down a hill, or golfing near the ocean.
Kat Cox
CONTENT AND RESEARCH LEAD
Kat is a writer and marketing expert with over 15 years of experience in corporate communications, digital marketing, and copywriting. Words and languages were her first love and led her to earn a bachelor's degree in linguistics specializing in cross cultural communication from Georgetown University and a master's of fine arts degree in creative writing specializing in fiction from the New School University. She finds joy in finding the exact word for a feeling or moment, whether in a blog post, short story, or conversation. Her work has been featured in Forbes, foundingAustin, The Santa Fe Reporter, Talkspace, Mend, and The New York Poetry Society. She continues her love of languages by studying and practicing French, Italian, and Spanish, traveling where she can speak them, and reading any fiction she can get her hands on. In her spare time, she co-hosts a podcast on sustainable living, Greening Up My Act, volunteers as an event organizer with her international running group, and sits on her front porch with her aging Labrador retriever mix, Emmett. You can find her short fiction on her website.
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