About Aware and Willing, LLC and Dick Hannasch

Aware and Willing was founded in 2019 by Dick Hannasch with a simple mission: You, better.

To elaborate, here is the mission and vision:

• Mission: To develop self-aware, ethical, and high-performing leaders, teams, and professionals through coaching, assessments, and training.  We focus on practical growth—helping individuals and organizations improve their effectiveness, relationships, and leadership abilities in measurable ways.

• Vision: Help individuals and organizations improve professional and personal relationships so they create and operate in adaptive, high-trust environments that enable people, teams, and organizations to achieve goals.

We carry out the mission and achieve the vision by:

• Assessing people with proven tools to  increase individual and team awareness.
• Coaching people to sharpen individual and team focus and improve performance.
• Training people to increase confidence and competence.

Dick is a working relationship coach who has coached, trained,  and developed thousands of people to improve working relationships,  become better leaders and teammates, reach career goals, change career  paths, and make other changes to become what he likes to call “You,  better.”  People describe his brand as an ethical judge who wants what is  fair and right, a truth teller, and a comedian who takes you seriously. 

Dick began coaching in 1999 while working for Fortune 500 company Principal Financial Group and has taught coaching skills to executives, managers, and individual contributors there and in other organizations.

He has coached internal and external clients from every continent except Antarctica who work in IT, finance, higher education, healthcare, agribusiness, manufacturing, consulting, government, manufacturing, real estate, non-profits, and other fields.

He aspires to always coach as one past client described Dick's style: "His approach is open, non-threatening, and nonjudgmental.  He is empathetic but doesn’t let you off the hook.”

He co-designed and taught Principal’s Coaching Bringing Out the Best in Others program that enabled the company to measurably improve its coaching culture and in 2015 earned a Brandon Hall Group Excellence Award Gold Medal for Best Advance in Coaching and Mentoring.  He is experienced coaching people one-on-one and in groups.

Dick holds these coaching certifications:

• Associate Certified Coach via the International Coach Federation since 2015
• Board Certified Coach via the Center for Credentialing & Education since 2012
• Stakeholder Centered Coach via Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coaching since 2019
• Culturally Intelligent Mentor Coach since 2024

To maintain his coaching designations and continually build his coaching acumen, Dick continues his ongoing development through continuing education each year via organizations such as the International Coach Federation and the World Business and Executive Coach Summit.

Dick has years of experience helping executives, leaders, and individual contributors become more aware and more effective by using assessments to increase their self-awareness to identify strengths and development needs.

In his career at Principal Financial Group in 2019, he co-led the design and implementation of a global program to assess  leadership talent using three assessments and other development tools to enhance the company's leadership talent pipeline.  In 2015, he led Principal's implementation effort to use assessments for hiring leaders and sales people and for developing talent already in the organization.   Principal continues using what he helped build and implement.

Dick is certified to administer and interpret assessments from these major  providers:

• Hogan Assesments
• Korn Ferry
• Assessments International
• Center for Creative Leadership.

He has administered and debriefed over 600 assessments for executives, leaders, individual contributors, and teams.

Dick has extensive experience designing and delivering training for delivery via classroom, virtual classroom, e-learning, and self-study on topics such as:

• Coaching and peer-to-peer coaching
• Building trust
• Communication skills such as having difficult conversations, giving feedback, seeking feedforward
• Leadership and transitioning into leadership roles
• Change management
• Strategic development planning
• Human performance improvement
• Internal consulting skills

In addition, he has been an adjunct instructor for a graduate program at Drake University and has created and delivered development programs for chapters of organizations such as the International Coach Federation, Association for Talent Development (ATD), and the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI).

Here are a few other things about Dick you may want to know:

• He is a kindergarten dropout and college dropout who bounced back to earn two degrees from Iowa State University (B.S. in English, M.Ed. with an emphasis in Organizational Learning and Human Resource Development).
• He's has been described as "The man who is nice to everyone on the planet, whether they deserve to be treated nicely or not."  (He took that not as criticism but as praise.)
• He was told, "You see the potential in everyone.  You've got to stop doing that!"  (He's chosen to ignore that feedback.)
• He has set a goal for 2025 to write one true short story about every year of his life.