Are you the leader you wish you would have had?

My clients have typically built successful careers. They're leading bigger teams, carrying greater responsibility and trying to create organisations where other people can thrive.

They come with questions like:

• Why is my job more "people" than "expertise"?

• Why is this harder than I expected?

• How do I get my team to make more decisions without me?

• Would I want to work for me?

Executive coaching helps you look at the whole picture

What you want from your work, what it's like to be led by you, and the impact you're having on the business.

The conversation that brings us together is rarely where we end up. My coaching superpower is hearing the story underneath the story. I’ll hold up a mirror, ask questions that make you stop and think, and challenge you to ask more of yourself. I’ll celebrate your wins and we’ll probably laugh a lot along the way.

What working together looks like

Every coaching engagement is unique, but we almost always start with an assessment or two. This gives us a shared starting point and a common language, and we'll agree on what success will look like.

I draw on my own corporate leadership experience, traditional coaching, systems thinking, psychology and behavioural science, underpinned by an endless curiosity about how people think and work together.

Clients typically start working with me for six months and often stay for a year or more. Together we'll figure out the structure and rhythm that best supports you.

Related Leadership Story: When success isn’t the finish line

Leadership is messy. Teams are too. That’s normal.

Strong leadership teams develop over time. The work starts with understanding ourselves and each other, then widens from:

me → you → us → the leadership team → the organisation

I start by getting underneath what's really happening in your team and where greater collective effectiveness would make the biggest difference. Then we decide together where to focus and design the work around what the team actually needs.

What team coaching might include

• Individual conversations and assessments

• Leadership team coaching

• Observation of the team in action

• Peer coaching and reflection between sessions

• Regular conversations with the team sponsor

• Experiential sessions built around what we're learning

When we're together, expect to experiment. I create experiences that give the team a chance to see itself in action, often using real business challenges as our material. You may find yourself in a situation designed to bring familiar behaviours to the surface. We notice what happens, make sense of it and try something different.

You’ll take that learning back into the business, where there's time to use it, forget it, possibly fail, rediscover it and learn some more. The most effective team coaching engagements happen over several months rather than in a day.

What you can expect

Over time, leaders understand themselves and one another better, changing the conversations they're having and how they work together. Trust grows, decisions and accountability become more clear, and people become more connected across functions as they increasingly see the success of the whole business as something they own together.

The organisation starts to experience them as one leadership team.

Related Leadership Story: Strengthening collective leadership

Sometimes coaching develops into something broader: an ongoing strategic partnership.

Over time, I come to know your business and your people, including the history, relationships, dynamics and twists and turns behind the conversations we're having. I know where you started and where you are now. (You've come a long way.) And we're still working together on what's next.

A thinking partner who already knows the context

We don't have to spend as much time catching up, so we can get straight into the thinking, decisions and conversations that move things ahead.

Our relationship evolves as you do. Sometimes we're focused on you as a leader, sometimes it's your executive team, a strategic decision, a succession plan or a difficult conversation that can't wait until next month. And sometimes we just talk about... life.

Related Leadership Story: Leadership is a long game

My career has been one long series of unexpected adventures. I'm still slightly surprised by some of the places it's taken me.

I've found myself in Big Four consulting, Fortune 500 organisations, family enterprises, on factory floors, out in the African bush, and in unfamiliar countries and cultures. None of it came with a how-to manual.

These days, I'm increasingly intentional about how I spend my time and who I spend it with. I do work I care about with people I genuinely enjoy.

Outside of work, you'll usually find me trying to navigate life as an American in an English village (with varying degrees of success), walking the Surrey Hills with two ridiculous dogs, trying to keep up with my twin teenage daughters, playing tennis, singing or travelling to new places.