NGC Experience: Sarah Glova

Sarah Glova is the President and Founder of Reify Media, a five-year-old digital media company in the Triangle area of North Carolina. But she laughs that she’s really CEO: Chief Everything Officer.

“When you’re in that position of being where the buck stops and where all questions fall, there can be a lot of pressure,” she said. “You always have that balance of focusing on the strategy of the company while dealing with the day-to-day tasks of communication and email and to-dos.”

Sarah relies heavily on her team and found herself wanting to do more for them. Then she enrolled in the Foundation for Effective Leadership from NextGen Center. The experience was both surprising and successful.

“The first takeaway from the course that I put into place immediately was the idea of intention,” she shared. “Now, when I’m talking to my team or to clients, and I ask, what do you want to take out of this? What is the goal? That kind of puts parameters on the meeting, and it makes sure that our time is used effectively, which we all want.”

Another experience Sarah learned from the program was a coaching model — a practice that had participants relearning the art of decision-making. For Sarah, it expanded her understanding of right or wrong, effective or ineffective.

“I found that my thinking was binary. I was either going to do something or I wasn’t going to do it.” The coaching model introduced her to other options.

“It’s not so black and white,” she explained. “If we can take a step back and envision other options and think about what a best case scenario is, it’s incredible what we can think of that’s out of the box. And I think that fits to definitely the mission of NextGen, but I think I can apply it to the mission of my company and so I’m really excited about that.”

As an entrepreneur and business owner, Sarah had a particular experience with NextGen Center. And she noted how distinct the experience was for each participant. All valuable, but all unique.

“I feel like I have practiced a coaching mindset that can help me with communication with my team that I’ve just never had before. So we all walked away with these different things. They were all related to leadership skills and using leadership as a tool.”