312: Match Your Client’s Intensity with Corinne Gavlinski
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https://youtu.be/jtNEdTVPrwE
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Corinne Gavlinski, high-impact leadership and team development coach and creator of the Executive Table Read (XTR) method, is on a mission to help leaders improve communication, understand their people, and drive stronger team performance by transforming how leaders read, interpret, and utilize the strengths of their teams.
We explore Corinne’s Executive Table Read framework: table read the script, understand the actors, get how to utilize them, and optimize team performance—a method that helps executives gain clarity, reduce friction, and build alignment inside leadership teams. Corinne shares why many leadership issues stem from misunderstanding roles, how actor awareness reshapes collaboration, and why structured team conversations are essential for building healthy, high-performing executive groups.
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Match Your Client’s Intensity with Corinne Gavlinski
Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here, the Founder and CEO of the Summit OS® Group, and I have as my guest, Corinne Gavlinski today, who is a high-impact leadership and team development coach and the creator of the Executive Table Read, or XTR process. Corinne, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Steve. Pleasure to be here.
Well, it’s exciting to have you here and to learn about your wonderful framework. But first thing first — tell me about your personal “Why,” and what are you doing to manifest it in your practice and business?
Yes, I’d be happy to. If I’m honest, Steve, I’ve enjoyed and led an accomplished career, much like my colleagues, and the clients that I have. And I realized far too late in that great career that I was paying attention to the wrong things. And I wasn’t being intentional about the legacy that I really wanted to leave from a leadership perspective. And that only came on the heels of a pretty big identity jolt, which was losing both of my parents in succession. And so today,
I work with leaders who care about their legacy, who care about their people, and have pressures on them to perform that perhaps distract them from that intention.
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And so I teach that which I, too, had to learn. And I work with executive leaders to do just that.
I like it. This is very noble. So what is your legacy that you are pursuing?
I hope my legacy is that I grew others. And as I said, I’m not sure I did that my whole career. In fact, I’m darn sure I did not. It took me a long time to realize that my own growth would be enhanced and amplified by me allowing others to grow that were on my team. And so if I had to say a legacy that I hope I leave, it’s that I left others with a strong sense of self, that I helped them develop new skills, and that they grew in areas that they hadn’t even dreamed possible, perhaps.
Love it. Well, I mean, that’s the beauty of coaching — that if you are able to amplify whatever you learned and pay it forward multiple times, it can have a big impact on people get there 20 years earlier, 30 years earlier, then imagine how much they can achieve in that time.
That’s right.
I love it. That’s great. So tell me about this process that you developed — the Executive Table Read. It sounds like very Hollywood-ish.
Yes.
It’s very interesting. What is it?
I put my money where my mouth is. I’m not only a coach, but I hire my own coaches. And this was born out of a working session that I did with one of my coaches, and
I was interested in doing something that started with the team. And I wanted to reorient leaders to that focus on their team and not just on the self.
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Much like a director in a movie or a sitcom might do, they often will get actors around the table to do a table read. And I thought, what a fun play on words if I can get corporate leaders to do a similar exercise whereby they are learning about people around their table in a new way, so that they can understand how to optimize those individuals that are on the team, perform at perhaps a higher level, and agree together what behaviors will make them successful.
And so from that was born the Executive Table Read, and it’s a series of activities that, in under 45 days, will arm a leader and his or her team with data, custom analysis, and real performance measures that they can both take on a day one and 90 days later to ensure that they are being accountable to what they said was most important.
Yeah, that’s fascinating. So it’s an exercise where, as a leader, you can learn about other people, and then you can get them to commit to goals and to objectives, and then you follow up with them. So is this a repeatable process, or is this a one-off thing?
It takes an evolution. I think there’s an initial Executive Table Read, whereby we go through a three-step process of collecting data, analyzing and sharing that data out with the team, determining behaviors that are important, as I say, and then measuring those behaviors. And there’s a roadmap that leader receives to then take action with his or her team. What comes after that is, customarily, some work with that leader one-on-one. It may result in an evolution of working with that team again. It’s kind of the XTR 2.0, if you will. I’ve done work with teams, particularly sales teams, where we’ve taken the initial Executive Table Read and then taken an aspect of that and gone into a second event with them to do some team development around the aspect that they felt was important to go a little deeper on. So it can evolve, but it is meant to be an initial snapshot in its original form that then can be built upon in a custom way.
Yeah, I like it. And I think a lot of leaders and even coaches miss the opportunity to really analyze the personalities that are around the table.
Yeah.
When they start working with them, they can fail to exploit the opportunity to improve them and improve the communication, knowing the different communication styles and approaches between people. And a dysfunctional team is going to be much, much slower to the momentum.
Yes. That’s right. I think
leaders do a very good job of understanding how their team members fit into the roles in which they're assigned
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where they may not do as good a job. And I say that because I did not do as good a job in really understanding how those individuals think. How they inherently behave during times of when they’re not under duress and stress. And when you do, you get a better sense for the capabilities on your team. And moreover, where there may be friction points on your team that might not have been obvious before, but have a reason behind them. And then you can go about addressing that. So you can go about optimizing the talents on your team because you now understand how people think, process information, and innately or inherently behave, and you may have uncovered that if you have team members who are extremely different from one another, you can see where that friction could occur and mitigate any conflict as a result. So it’s a powerful tool when layered with some custom analysis because you get some real insight that maybe you didn’t have the time or the energy to do yourself.
So when you do this analysis, do you then use it as a group and facilitate the resolution, or is it a one-on-one tool?
We do. We do. We do both actually, Steve. So an individual will receive a bit of coaching one-on-one as well as the team. So we start with some insight around individual thinking styles and behaviors, and helping that person to understand who they are. And then we, as a team, meet and debrief the results of the analysis and talk a little bit about how that helps the team to be successful, where might friction occur? How can those talents be better utilized, and based on the behaviors identified in the team, what are the most necessary for their specific discipline, whether that’s sales or an
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