My Services
Team coaching for senior teams at turning points
Most senior teams can run business as usual. The test comes when the ground moves: a sale is on the horizon, a merger has to be made to work, a new chief executive arrives, or leadership passes from one generation to the next.
At those moments the team’s habits are exposed. Decisions slow, honest conversation moves to the corridors, and the gap between what is said in the room and what is said afterwards widens.
That is the work I do: senior leadership team coaching through the turning points that decide what the organisation becomes next.
The turning points I’m brought in for
Preparing for a sale or investment
A buyer is paying for the group of people who have to keep delivering the numbers for three years after completion, usually without the founder. Every corporate finance adviser will tell you that owner dependency and a thin leadership team damage a valuation. Fixing that is my job.
The work usually starts eighteen months to three years out, which is when it can still change anything. It covers the conversations that get postponed while everyone concentrates on the numbers: who is actually running what after the founder steps back, which relationships sit with one person, and what this team will and will not accept from a new owner. A team that decides well together and keeps hold of its clients and best people is worth more at the point of sale. It is also a considerably better team to be part of on the way there, whatever the deal does.
To be clear about scope: I am not a corporate finance adviser and I take no part in the transaction. I provide no due diligence, valuation, investment or tax advice. That is what lets me work alongside the advisers who do.
Making a merger work
Most deals fail in the eighteen months after completion, when two legacy leadership teams become one and nobody says out loud whose way of working has actually won.
I work with the people side of that: forming a single leadership team from two, surfacing the assumptions and loyalties each side brought with them, and getting the unspoken version of the deal into the open early enough to do something about it.
I have lived this from the inside. As Chief Human Resources Officer at Universum during its acquisition by StepStone Group, I was the only member of the senior leadership team appointed by the new parent. I ran the people side of the integration across 200 people in twelve countries, reporting to the chief executive. My first six months included a change of chief executive, a rebuilt global bonus and commission scheme, and a restructured global sales team. Twelve months after completion, employee turnover was 15%. It had been 15% before the deal.
A new chief executive or senior leader
An incoming leader inherits a set of habits nobody chose deliberately, and the window for changing them is shorter than most people think. This work forms the team around the new chapter before the old patterns close back over.
Succession and leadership change
Turning the page on purpose, so the incoming team is not quietly governed by the outgoing team’s assumptions about who defers to whom.
A first real leadership team
A group of capable department heads becoming a unit that leads the whole organisation. Until that happens they are five functions that meet monthly and report upwards in turn.
A change of strategy or direction
The plan has changed but the objectives and the pecking order were built for the old one, and every meeting runs on yesterday’s logic until someone resets the table.
It starts with a diagnostic
Before any programme, I run a leadership team diagnostic. I speak with every member of the team, one to one and in confidence. I write up what those conversations reveal as a short synthesis of the patterns shaping how the group works. The team then spends a half day working with it together. Three to four weeks end to end.
The synthesis reflects shared patterns and nothing is attributed to a named person. It goes to the whole team, and the sponsor sees it when the team does. Everyone reads the same document before the session.
There is no obligation to continue beyond the diagnostic, and it is priced to stand on its own. Some teams take it and act on it themselves. Most conclude there is work to do together, and we agree a programme from there, designed around what the diagnostic actually found. I have run it with leadership teams across professional services, education, healthcare and the charity sector.
If you want one thing to judge me on before committing to anything longer, this is it.
The programme:
A committed run of team sessions, paced to what the business needs rather than fixed to the calendar, with each session building on the commitments made at the last. The commitments come from the team itself. That is the only kind that survives contact with a difficult Tuesday.
Typical areas of focus:
What this team repeats under pressure, and what it costs
The work that only this team can do, as distinct from the work it has drifted into
The quality of debate and decision-making, and the decisions that keep coming back
The capacity to disagree without damage
Trust, appreciation and accountability at team level
Power dynamics and avoidance, worked with explicitly
How meetings run and decisions get made on an ordinary Tuesday
What makes this different
I work with what sits beneath performance: the patterns a team repeats, and the parts of the conversation people avoid because they feel too risky. My approach is Gestalt-informed. In practice that means the work goes into shifting the conditions that produce the behaviour, and very little into trying to fix individuals.
Where it earns its place, I use psychometric data. I am accredited in the full Hogan suite (HPI, HDS and MVPI) and in Insights Discovery. These earn their keep as a catalyst for a more honest conversation. A profile that becomes a label to hide behind has failed, and I will say so.
Free Initial Consultation
If your team is facing one of these turning points, book a 30-minute call and we will work out whether a diagnostic is the right first step.