Gilles spent 10 years as Director of Operations with the Montreal Expos Baseball Club then went on to get an MBA where he discovered that ‘managing the people part’ of any organization is the most difficult and usually the most important aspect of any business enterprise. As an academic he undertook to research the value of management coaching and how it might be better defined and applied. His research ultimately led him to Caterpillar as Director of Learning & Development for one of its Canadian distributors where he empirically tested his coaching model (PMC). In 2000, he published the successful ‘Tales from the Playing Field - a new strategy for Business Management Coaching’ (Woodley & Watts, 2000), launched his firm Personalized Management Coaching (PMC) and began consulting/training a host of Fortune 500 companies. In 2004 he joined Corporate Express/Staples as Director of Learning & Development where he continued to measure the causes and effects of effective coaching. At the same time he licensed out the rights to the PMC model and its proprietary assessment tools to a select group of consulting companies in North America, the UK, and most recently China. Today, after 20 years of constant testing and validating for reliability and accuracy, the PMC coaching model is being applied in several multi-national organizations of various sizes and industries. He continues to promote the importance of measuring the relationship between leaders and their direct reports (coaching effectiveness) in order to ensure that the PMC program is delivering on its promise. Gilles and his wife Cheryl have four adult boys and two grand-children. He enjoys reading, sports, flying, building, and their summer cottage in Northern Ontario.
