Meet the Team
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MARK BAGGETT, PhD.
FOUNDER / PERFORMANCE COACH
Senior Performance Coach, Retired U.S. Army Colonel and Operational Psychologist with 30+ years of experience working in the DoD. I’ve worked as a performance coach with the DoDs most elite forces: Army Special Forces and Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, MARSOC Raiders and elite intelligence collectors. My coaching relies on techniques developed for elite DoD Operators that have been adapted for the corporate world.
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Fritz Sleigher, MBA
PERFORMANCE COACH
With over 20 years as a US Marine and intelligence operations specialist, Fritz Sleigher empowers organizations to seize opportunities and overcome obstacles with strategic precision. As a master instructor and USC Marshall School of Business graduate, he transforms individuals, teams, and organizations into top-tier performers, aligning leadership development with business goals for sustainable growth.
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McKenzie Rath, MA
PERFORMANCE COACH
A seasoned cognitive performance coach with extensive experience in resilience and performance training, primarily within military settings. I specialize in applying theory to performance to increase productivity. I have focused on building out a coaching program that captures sport psychology, emotional intelligence, and interpersonal skills that effectively translates from the military to corporate contexts.
Who we are
Why Capstone Performance Coaching?
Capstone Performance Coaching LLC is focused on training you to maximize your influence and persuasion skills in corporate environments. We teach you how to assess a perspective buyer or future business partner and develop an influence plan tailored to maximize their interest.
Approaching a future business partner can be tricky and we’re here to help. We will teach you how to accurately assess your future business partner’s needs and motivations. We coach you on eliciting points of influence in those you hope to negotiate with. Once we work together to create a plan of influence, we will then coach you through practice scenarios to make sure your persuasion skills are as airtight as possible.
One of the challenges we’ve observed with some clients is coaching them to make their influence approach appear natural. We will coach you on approaching the different levers of influence in a natural, conversational manner. A person who appears unnatural will be perceived as socially incongruent with their personality and that perception can sabotage results. We direct our coaching efforts towards getting you to own your influence skill set. Through coaching adapted to your specific situation, your sales approach pitch, your next merger or a critical business negotiation can flow naturally and with minimal effort through practiced coaching of these skills sets.
Once you are armed with a targeted influence plan and tailored persuasion skills, your probability of closing the deal will be greatly enhanced. The influence skills you develop will be skills you keep for a lifetime. Our goal is always to help you be even better with your next merger or acquisition. Combining radically business cultures is another task we can help with. Business mergers are often cultural mergers. This process has to start with an understating of the culture and needs of the organization being acquired. With practice and coaching, many of these skills will become more natural over time. As the coaching process develops, we find our clients get better at identifying the key influence levers themselves.
Each business or corporation is a little different and so, each influence plan must be developed and adapted for our clients which allows them to maximize their persuasion techniques with their own perspective client. The ability to adapt to corporate environments with radically different corporate cultures requires cognitive and interpersonal agility. We’ve noticed that as our clients learn our coaching techniques, they begin to adapt these lessons on their own and apply them in novel ways. There is nothing more gratifying than watching our clients attain a level of mastery beyond all goals we established during our initial coaching period.
questions and
answers
Questions:
1. Q: Is this process training in manipulation?
A: No, manipulation generally involves getting someone to do something they don’t want to do. Many definitions of manipulation include elements of coercion. We specifically teach people to avoid coercive approaches because they trap people into short term compliance but also leave the person looking for a way to exit the situation. Coercion is to be avoided always as it’s an inferior form of influence.
2. Q: Why are targeted influence assessments better than general persuasion and influence skills?
A: Targeted assessment helps you tailor your influence approach to a specific individual making them much more powerful than general techniques.
3. Q: Aren’t you just coaching people to pretend to be someone they are not?
A: No, we are coaching our clients to become someone they want to be. To execute the perfect company merger, you may have to modify your approach. To close the biggest sale of your career you may have to flex your own interpersonal style. It’s not a matter of pretending to be someone you are not; it’s about becoming who you need to be to accomplish your goals.
4. Q: Aren’t you just training people on how to change other people’s minds to accomplish your own goals.
A: It’s generally the person doing the influencing who must change in order to accomplish their goals. Our clients often find themselves adapting to another person’s personality style to be successful in their negotiations. Maximizing influence is all about understanding the other person and seeing the world from their perspective so that you can use that knowledge and connect with them.
5. Q: What about books and classes on influence and persuasion? Are they helpful?
A: Yes, books and classes on influence and persuasion can be very helpful. They give you the theoretical background for many of the skills we are coaching. Just like reading a book on golf will likely help you understand how to be a better golfer. However, there’s no substitute for learning to play golf than golfing. In the same way, reading about influence will help you better understand the theory behind influence. However, most people need more than just theory, they need practical application. We teach the practical application of these principles (praxis). Our coaching is praxis focused so that you will get the most results in the shortest amount of time. The theoretical basis for our coaching methodology is important and will enhance your development through independent study designed to strengthen newfound skills. We incorporate ample foundational knowledge on influence into our coaching, but we are always focused on the practical application of this knowledge.
6. Q: Do you do Executive Coaching?
A: Executive Coaching can focus on improving interpersonal skills in a business environment across a broad range of categories. Capstone Performance Coaching is focused on improving the skill set of assessing others, building an influence plan, maximizing your persuasiveness for a particular individual or business. Clients who choose Capstone will get the most out of our coaching when they come with a goal for a particular negotiation, sale, merger, or corporate acquisition. We call this are of business consulting performance coaching to identify it as a subset of executive coaching.
7. Q: Can you tell me if my planned merger is a good decision?
A: No, we don’t evaluate the viability business mergers or acquisitions. Once the decision to conduct a merger has been made, we can help you manage your company’s business culture and how to adapt another company’s culture to maximize the success of the merger.
8. Q: Can you tell me if I have identified the right market to sell my product?
A: No, we don’t do market analysis. Once you have identified a specific market you would like to compete in, we can help your company adapt to your corporate culture to match the target market’s expectations of what your product or service can provide.
9. Q: Can you tell me if the CEO we’re planning on making our sales pitch is the right CEO to approach.
A: No, we don’t make decisions about who is the best person to approach for a sale, merger or acquisition. If you have identified a business leader that you are approaching for a sale, merger or acquisition we can help you identify the strengths and vulnerabilities of that person and how influence them to get the best possible outcome for your company.
