Wai@UnleashedLeaders.com • 650-438-4633

Wai Poc is an Executive Coach with +20 years of leadership experience from Fortune 500 companies to C-levels at start-ups.  For the last ~10 years of executive coaching, Wai has specialized in being a sounding board to help his clients build strategic relationships.

Wai’s sectors of expertise are high tech and biotech.  He loves engineers, technologists (scientific, medical, and operational), and all those in G&A functions due to having coached out of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

In his last in-house role at Genentech for +10 years, Wai consulted – before, during, and after – reorgs with VP clients and their leadership teams in Engineering, Product, Research, Sales & Marketing, and G&A. Not only has Wai been ‘at the table’ on key business decisions, but also he got into coaching as a result of facilitating succession planning up to and including the SVP and CMO levels.

Innovation comes from the mixing of a wide range of ideas.  Wai values diversity, having recruited at the National Black MBA Association and at Out and Equal.  As the male co-lead for a gender diversity strategy for +2000, he presented on Gender Diversity at the National Institutes of Health.

Born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong and Miami, Wai identifies as Chino-Latino.  Crossing cultural bridges from his earliest years, Wai has traveled to +60 countries. A sabbatical field expedition to Madagascar led Wai to MacArthur Fellow and primatologist Patricia C. Wright, with whom he is now writing a book on power and politics in the workplace. Their goal is to decode the primate roots of human competition and collaboration with Unleashed:  A Field Guide to Power and Politics at Work.

Focus Areas

• Strategic Influence:  building cross functional allies
• Power and Politics:  navigating up, down, and across
• Leading Change:  scaling by leading leaders and senior teams
• Diversity and Global View:  innovating with different ideas
• Well Being at the Executive Levels:  rebalancing for resilience

Examples of Past Coaching Engagements

• CTO at PE-backed AI company with unicorn clients:  Leading change, incl. reorgs, to scale and integrate Machine Learning into global Engineering
• Executive Director in Professional Services:  Lifting up from what pays today to form a go-to market strategic vision for what pays tomorrow
• Sr. Group Medical Director:  Leading team of MDs and influencing executive decision-making
• General Counsel at VC-backed biotech:  Widening into enterprise responsibilities, from avoiding legal risks to taking business risks
• VP in R&D:  Partnering with a woman of color on owning her full power at the executive level

Stanford’s Graduate School of Business

Wai is currently engaged in one of the following per academic quarter:

• OB 374:  Mentor / Facilitator in Interpersonal Dynamics, a Top 3 course for MBAs
• OB 372:  TA for David Bradford of “Influence without Authority”
• Leadership Coach for mid-career (35-45 years old) MSx Fellows
• Facilitator for groups in Executive Education with Directors and VPs
• Executive Coach with global CFOs through Executive Education 

Specialist in 360 Assessments

For several years until 2020, Wai was 1 of 5 global coaches delivering 360 assessments to all Directors at Google across the Americas, APAC and EMEA regions and enterprise-wide in Engineering / AI / Cloud, Product, Sales & Marketing, and Business & Strategic Partnerships.

Partial List of Clients 

• Google
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• AnswerLabs
• Jumio
• Mozilla
• Zynga
• Nintendo
• Oracle
• Oliver Wyman
• Russell Reynolds
• Federal Reserve Bank
• Stanford University Graduate School of Business
• Stanford University School of Law
• Stanford University Management Academy
• Mercy Housing for Seniors
• San Francisco’s Dept. of Public Health
• Centre ValBio, international wildlife conservation
• Imerys, industrial French multinational
• Weill Cornell Medical Center
• Sutter Health
• Kaiser Permanente
• Blue Shield
• Revance Therapeutics
• Theravance
• BioMarin
• McKesson
• Gilead
• Vaxcyte
• Genentech

Globally Virtually

Wai has coached clients in Germany, UK, Belgium, Spain, Uruguay, Brazil, South Africa, Japan, PRC / HK, India, New Zealand.

Coaching Affiliations

Korn Ferry, CoachSource, 7 Paths Forward, Stanford Graduate School of Business Coaches Consortium, Growth Axis, Mariposa Leadership

Education / Assessments / Certifications

Wai’s approach is personalized and not one-size-fits-all, meaning he integrates a wide continuing education into his executive coaching and selects for his clients what’s practical.

• David Peterson’s 7 Paths Forward for Advanced Coaching
• Marshall Goldsmith’s Stakeholder Centered Coaching
• NVW: Certified in Integral Coaching
• ICF:  Professional Certified Coach
• Stanford University: BA
• GGU (while working full-time): MBA
• Columbia University: Certified in OD
• UC Berkeley: Certified in HR
• Wharton: Certified in Strategic Decision-Making
• Caltech: Certified in Innovation Mgmt
• Grove Consulting’s Team Performance Indicator
• Glenn Parker Team Player Survey
• 5 Dysfunctions of Teams
• Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode for Negotiation
• Stephen Drotter’s Leadership Pipeline (from GE)
• Stanford LEAP 360
• Korn Ferry VOICES 360
• Design Thinking through IDEO
• Lominger’s Career Architect from Center for Creative Leadership
• MBTI / Myers-Briggs
• Enneagram
• Insights Discovery
• StrengthFinders
• Crucial Conversations
• Social Styles at Work
• Situational Leadership
• SPIN
• Barry Rhein’s Selling Through Curiosity
• Miller Heiman’s Large Account Mgmt
• Certified ScrumMaster in Agile and Lean Work Environments

To relax, Wai practices a therapeutic form of martial arts, occasionally conducts culinary experiments at home to his other half’s chagrin, loves nature but is leaving too many plants unattended, has a wishlist to learn the guitar to play Latin music, and makes up for spending too much time at work by providing snore-inducing massages to his dog Teddy Roosevelt and cat Geo.

It has taken +40 years.  Wai loves coaching his clients:  To build allies, access support, and get big things done!