Coaching
One to one work, built around your situation rather than a curriculum.
Almost everyone around a senior leader needs the decision to go a particular way, which is what makes an hour with someone who has no stake in it more useful than it sounds. Coaching gives you that hour, at a pace that lets you think properly about choices you are otherwise making at whatever speed the diary allows.
What non-directive means
You know your organisation, your people and your constraints better than I will, so someone arriving from outside with the answer is usually solving a version of the problem that does not exist. What I do instead is test your reasoning, ask about the things you have been working around, and name the reflexes shaping a decision before you have consciously chosen it. This takes longer than advice, however what you reach this way is still yours when the organisation pushes back on it, which is the point at which most borrowed answers fail.
When people come
They come when a step up has changed what the job requires, whether that is associate partner to partner, director to vice president, or a functional lead becoming accountable for a whole business. They come at the end of a long chapter, when what happens next will not answer itself and the obvious next move has stopped appealing. And they come while AI reorders what the firm sells, how it is delivered and what clients will pay for, faster than anyone has a settled view on.
Who I work with
I work with partners, senior partners and associate partners in law, consulting and professional services, and with directors and vice presidents in large organisations.
The Lumen Lens
The Lumen Lens is how I make sure nothing important in your situation goes unexamined. It has three parts, and where we begin follows from where you are and not from any fixed order
Perception. How you see.
The narratives and reflexes that shape your reading of a situation before you have consciously assessed it, and whether the organisation you assume you are leading is the one that exists.
Direction. How you decide.
The reasoning impacting your high stakes choices, and in particular whether a decision follows from judgement or from a reaction to something you would rather not name.
Connection. How others experience it.
Your personal operating model, where your attention and your energy actually go, and whether what you intend is what reaches the people you lead.
The shape of the work
We start with a conversation of thirty to forty-five minutes, at no charge and with no obligation on either side, about what you are dealing with and whether we would work well together. Chemistry matters more here than credentials do, and I would encourage you to speak to two or three coaches before you decide.
If we go ahead, the core engagement runs over six months, with six ninety-minute sessions and availability between them when something comes up that will not wait. We meet in person where that is practical and by video where it is not.
Some work is shorter and more intensive, built around a single transition, and some continues beyond six months. We agree the shape after that first conversation.
I work with a small number of leaders at a time, which is what allows the work to go deep.
We discuss investment once the shape is clear.
If this is close to what you are dealing with, the next step is a conversation.