What People are Saying About Steve

Steve served as the adviser to our student government (among many other things) for the three years I was involved with the Associated Students. Steve was an instrumental part in keeping the peace and guiding students to becoming better leaders. The leadership and opportunities Steve provided me with over the years were key in my development both in my time as a student and even after I graduated. As someone who at first didn’t quite understand the need for strengths training Steve worked with me one on one and found a way to break through my thick skull and help me understand how strengths training could help me further develop as a leader. Steve’s knowledge in the topic, many years of experience, and his personable nature make him an amazing Coach and if given the opportunity to work with him in any capacity in the future I would take it in a heartbeat.

Phil Coba, UC Merced Alumnus

Steve’s leadership, advice, and coaching helped me become a better leader and helped me communicate more effectively with my team. Steve was my direct supervisor when I worked at the student government office at the University of California, Merced. His strengths-based coaching definitely improved the dynamic of our team and allowed us to incorporate them into all of our projects and team meetings. Steve took the time to go through every team member’s top five strengths and had personal one on one meetings to ensure enough time to ask questions and understand our results. Steve’s strengths based coaching did not stop as soon as we left the coaching session. In fact, every week he would highlight one strength and we would discuss it at team meetings and find ways to incorporate that strength into the work we were doing. Steve’s coaching was incredibly helpful and I was able to apply it to both a team and manager setting. I still find myself incorporating the strengths and coaching I learned as I worked with Steve and encourage anyone to take a coaching session with him.

Jazmin Marroquin, UC Merced Alumna

I’ve been through my strengths before but never had I been through them with someone as passionate and deadly knowledgeable about the work as Steve is. He helped me to feel comfortable, I left our coaching session with clear takeaways that has helped me to level up in many areas of my life.

Darryl Bellamy, Keynote Speaker at Bellamy Inspires

Steve is an excellent strengths-based coach. He thoroughly explained my top five strengths with great detail, further helped me explore my top ten strengths and asked questions to help me gain greater insight as to how I use such strengths daily. Steve also helped clarify any misconceptions or misinterpretations I had about my strengths-based results. I appreciate Steve’s ability to connect at both an individual and group level. He is certainly passionate and gifted in his approach to ensure each person understands their strengths and how to continue cultivating such strengths.

Geraldina Espinosa, Program Analyst at UC Merced

My coaching experience was very eye opening for me. I was able to ask specific things about what my results meant, specifically the parts that I saw as weaknesses. Through the sessions, I dug deeper into the results and was able to better understand how to best utilize my strengths and how to manage the items towards the bottom of the list. Steve’s coaching was very enlightening and helpful, his guidance really made a difference in the way I viewed and approached/utilized my results.

Daniela Silva, UC Merced Student

Steve was an excellent coach. After hearing my goals and questions I had, Steve provided useful feedback for taking my work from good to great using my natural talents. I personally come up with lots of ideas; I appreciated Steve’s intuitive way of asking questions to help me refine ideas I shared with him and to hone in on important next steps.

Jacob Croasdale, Margo Souza Center Coordinator at UC Merced

Steve recently led my department in the Strengths Finder assessment. He managed our loud group very well and was very constructive in encouraging participation from all members. The activities he brought with him were engaging and we are continuing to use them. My team is still talking about how this was so helpful in their current position as well as thinking about their goals. I would highly recommend this training with Steve as your facilitator for anyone looking to gain some momentum, confidence, and understanding on their team.

Becky Ferguson, Director of Customer Services at UC Davis

Steve is an excellent Strengths Coach! His insights into our team strengths, as well as my own individual ones, were incredibly valuable. Though I had carefully studied my results and what I thought they meant, Steve was able to point out numerous other examples and instances which never even occurred to me. Our session was just as fun as it was informative. I strongly recommend Steve to all for Strengths coaching!

Nicholas Tafacory, Administrative Coordinator at St. Edward’s University

Steve provided a very meaningful process that included individual coaching sessions with our staff and management sessions with our management team. These culminated in a great day of group learning and team building skillfully facilitated by Steve. Our staff was very engaged in this interactive process and Steve helped us identify common language to communicate more effectively with each other. We look forward to using what we learned from the Gallup Strengths Finder process to further develop our team and organizational goals. I highly recommend Steve Lerer to any organization that is looking for positive and constructive methods for increasing individual and team success.

Laurie Silver, Executive Director At Northland Cares

Steve facilitated a Gallup Strengths Finder assessment for our team in November of 2017. He did an extraordinary job coaching us throughout the different group activities and helped identify both our individual and team strengths. As a result, our team was able to learn more about each other. Therefore, it maximized our team effectiveness and combined our skills to improve our performance. I do believe that without Steve’s expertise we would not have obtained the same results.

Pablo Emmanuel Gutierrez Benitez, Transfer Center Assistant at Merced Community College District