The Work.
Every engagement begins the same way. We meet. We figure out what's actually happening, with you, with your team or with your company. From there, we customize a plan.
Executive Coaching. For founders, CXOs, or rising leaders. A trusted coaching relationship is useful at all times, but the start of one is typically prompted by a change, threshold, or a gap. A new role. A promotion. A challenging dynamic. A loss. Sometimes coaching is built around a critical juncture: an interview, a board meeting, a negotiation, the first ninety days in a new role. Regardless of the catalyst, one-on-one executive coaching provides space for leaders to express, challenge, and develop.
Team Coaching. For leadership teams and co-founders. Executive coaching can do a lot, but people function as part of teams, and sometimes teams need coaching as a system. In startups, or post-startups, founder relationships that were designed early on may not fit once things scale. When decisions slow down, when conflict disappears from view instead of getting resolved, or when growth stalls, team coaching could be the answer. I start by meeting with the team members and then dive into actual team meetings and projects to understand not what is described, but what is lived.
Strategic Advisory. Strategic Advisory. Some challenges don't fit neatly into coaching. A founder needs another perspective. A strategy or roadmap exists, but operating it isn't working. A CEO is reorganizing the company. A succession process carries more risk than anyone wants to admit. This is where I step in with embedded, fractional, or interim expertise: Chief of Staff, COO, or Head of People and Talent.
In practice.
The Scripts. A senior leader was getting interviews, not offers. Sharp, credentialed, and unreachable in the room. I told him the truth: he was performing competence instead of showing it, leaning on scripts that had become armor. When we got him talking about the work that actually energized him, the scripts fell away. He landed the offer.
The Hold. A senior executive had been holding out after a layoff for nearly a year when an offer finally came. Wrong role, wrong scope, wrong number. Her anxiety said take it. She knew better. We held the line on what was true about her. She declined, and the company came back with the role and the compensation she was worth.
The Uncontracted Relationship. A leader kept getting managed by a peer in their shared work and couldn't understand why. My first question: what did you agree to when you started working together? He went quiet. They never had. It wasn't a personality problem. It was an uncontracted relationship.
The Room. A sponsor brought me into a leadership team to work on strategy and alignment. I sat in on the actual discussion. The team was engaged, the debate was real, but some voices were carrying the room and others had gone quiet. Nobody had named it. I did. Once it was said out loud, the balance shifted, and the people who'd gone quiet started talking.
Background.
Before founding my practice, I spent sixteen years inside organizations where leadership decisions had measurable consequences. At Heidrick & Struggles and Blackstone, I worked on the systems used to identify, assess, develop, and deploy leaders. It's where I learned that the official version and the real one are rarely the same.
Credentials.
Blackstone. Heidrick and Struggles. Columbia. Brown. ICF ACC. Hogan Certified.