Work with me

Executive coaching

When the map runs out, judgement matters more than answers

You are probably not short of intelligence, experience or effort. The challenge is more likely to be that you have reached a situation where the approaches that got you this far are no longer quite enough.

Perhaps you need the commitment of people you cannot direct. Perhaps competing stakeholders are pulling in different directions. You may be stepping into a bigger role, facing a decision with no obviously right answer, or discovering that sustained leadership pressure is beginning to take a personal toll.

Executive coaching can be particularly useful when you are:

• Building influence with stakeholders you do not control
• Navigating organisational politics without losing integrity
• Leading through uncertainty when there is no obviously correct answer
• Moving into greater complexity, scope or visibility
• Rethinking patterns or assumptions that have become limiting
• Managing the personal cost of sustained leadership pressure

How I work

We use the real situations you are facing as the material for the coaching. I am there to help you slow the situation down, see what you may not be seeing, challenge assumptions, explore the wider system and decide what you want to do next. I will support you, but I will also challenge you when that is useful.

I bring thirty years of work with leaders alongside experience as a business leader, executive educator and systems thinker. I have carried a P&L and made decisions when the consequences were mine, so our conversations can move comfortably between the human, political, systemic and commercial dimensions of leadership.

I set up my engagements to typically be 4 sessions or 8 sessions or multiples of, just so we can keep the work bounded.

I also work with a range of psychometrics and 260 degree feedback tools, and these can be used prior to, during or post-coaching if required.

Everything is confidential. That is not a footnote. It is the foundation.

Strategic facilitation

When progress depends on shared understanding, not instructions

Some of the most important moments in an organisation’s life are not about what one leader decides. They are about what a group of people come to understand together and what they choose to do about it.

A strategy needs shaping. Different stakeholders see the problem differently. A change has become stuck. A difficult issue keeps circling without resolution. Or an important group needs to move from competing perspectives towards enough shared understanding to act.

That is when the quality of the conversation matters.

Strategic facilitation is particularly useful for:

• Leadership off-sites and strategic conversations
• Sensemaking during significant change or uncertainty
• Cross-functional groups working across competing priorities
• Multi-stakeholder conversations where interests or perspectives differ
• Situations where trust is fragile or positions have become entrenched
• Moving groups from debate towards decision, ownership and commitment

How I work

Facilitation at its best is not the management of a meeting. It is the deliberate design of conditions in which people can think together more clearly, surface what matters and take genuine ownership of what comes next.

I have been facilitating groups for three decades and hold the Certified Professional Facilitator (CPF) credential with the International Association of Facilitators. My background in design, experiential learning and systems thinking shapes how I construct the process as much as what happens in the room.

I draw on approaches including Open Space Technology, World Café, structured dialogue and systems methods, but I do not begin with a favourite methodology. I begin with what this group needs to accomplish and design backwards from there.

Work can be delivered in person, remotely or in hybrid formats.

Leadership development

Growing capacity, not just adding capability

Most leadership development adds tools to a toolkit. Sometimes that is exactly what is needed.

But as leaders take on broader and more complex roles, the challenge increasingly becomes something else: making sense of ambiguity, holding competing perspectives, working across boundaries and exercising judgement when no framework can provide the answer.

That requires more than knowing another model.

Leadership development can help organisations whose leaders need to:

• Lead effectively across functions, boundaries and stakeholder networks
• Develop greater influence without relying on formal authority
• Make better sense of complexity and uncertainty
• Exercise judgement when problems do not have straightforward answers
• Learn more deliberately from experience
• Lead change while maintaining performance, relationships and trust

How I work

I design learning around the situations leaders actually face. That means combining serious ideas and research with cases, experiments, reflection, peer learning, practice and application back into the workplace.

My roots are in experiential education and I have subsequently spent decades designing and delivering executive education for leaders across sectors and countries. My systems thinking background helps me connect individual leadership behaviour with the wider organisational environment in which that behaviour has to work.

I also have more than twenty years’ experience designing and delivering remote learning, so global programmes do not need to be compromised simply because participants are geographically dispersed.

Typical engagements include:

• Bespoke leadership programmes for senior cohorts
• Leadership journeys linked to organisational transformation or strategic change
• Development focused on matrix, cross-boundary or complexity leadership
• Remote and hybrid programmes for international or dispersed populations
• Advisory work for organisations designing their own leadership development

The aim is not simply for leaders to leave knowing more.

It is for them to notice more, make better sense of what they see and have greater range in what they do next.

Leadership team development

When a group of strong leaders needs to become a stronger team

A leadership team can contain highly capable individuals and still struggle collectively.

Priorities compete. Difficult conversations are avoided. Meetings become places for reporting rather than thinking. Functional loyalties overwhelm collective responsibility. Decisions appear to have been made, only to unravel afterwards. Or the team simply never creates enough space to ask how well it is actually working together.

Team development focuses on the team itself: how people think together, make decisions, handle disagreement, build trust and take collective responsibility for what happens next.

This work is particularly useful when a leadership team needs to:

• Build greater trust and openness without avoiding productive disagreement
• Move from functional representation towards genuine collective leadership
• Clarify purpose, priorities, roles and ways of working
• Improve the quality and speed of decisions
• Surface tensions or patterns that are getting in the way
• Strengthen accountability across, rather than only down, the organisation
• Navigate a significant transition, change in membership or new strategic challenge

How I work

I do not approach team development as a one-off team-building event. We start with the real work of the team and pay attention to what happens while people are doing it.

That might involve interviews, observation, team diagnostics, facilitated working sessions, individual coaching or a series of interventions over several months. The exact design depends on what the team needs rather than a predetermined model or programme.

My role is to help the team notice its own patterns, talk about things that are difficult to discuss from inside the system, experiment with different ways of working and translate insight into changes people can actually experience.

This work can be done remotely, face-to-face, or as a hybrid effort. I can also teach your leaders how to go from FORM to PERFORM in an accelerated way, or coach your team leaders so they gain the confidence to do this themselves.

The aim is not simply a team that gets along better. It is a team that can think, decide and lead better together.