I offer one to one and team executive coaching; and tailored leadership development programmes for extended leadership teams.
Executive coaching
Common executive coaching themes include: leadership, transformation, performance, transitions, career and team. The sorts of questions that coaching clients explore in our work together are how to:
- flex leadership style to have maximum impact
- best make an individual and collective difference
- best manage my expectations of self and of others
- recognise, play to and further develop strengths
- sustain emotional intelligence and resilience
- best face up to challenge and find the right way through
- open up new options and opportunities
- successfully make a transition – whether on promotion within a current organisation or moving to an entirely new one
- stay true to values and yet be open to stretch, development and personal change
A typical initial executive coaching programme is 6–8 sessions, each up to 2 hours with an initial discussion to ensure that the personal chemistry feels right, enabling a trusted environment for the client to explore freely and with confidence.
Leadership development
The leadership development programmes I offer focus on building connectivity across extended senior leadership teams to strengthen relationships to encourage creativity, learning and growth.
This offers benefits to individuals as well as the organisation - releasing potential, reducing the costs of friction, increasing a shared sense of purpose, building emotional energy, supporting the ability to deliver on cross-institution strategic priorities, improving diversity and strengthening agency.
Programmes are tailor-made to the requirements of the individual institution, involving close working with the Vice Chancellor or Chief Executive. Typically they include a staged approach of assessment, including a series of structured, confidential discussions with senior leaders; options analysis; piloting proposals; and periodic check in and review. I draw from my experience as Vice Principal Leadership Development at Edinburgh University where I am working to build connection and strengthen individual and collective leadership capacity across the University's 150 most senior leaders.
Approach
Trust, attentive listening, intuition and empathy are core to my approach. I am client-led, founded in my belief that the most powerful and lasting benefit comes when individuals have the right conditions to explore, experiment and experience the change they want to be. I draw from person-centred and gestalt coaching theory; positive psychology; systems psychodynamics; and my research in emotionally intelligent leadership. I blend this with experience from my career as a senior leader and learning from my own transitions into different organisations.
I am professionally accredited at Senior Practitioner level by the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC); abide by the EMCC’s code of ethics; and receive regular supervision.