Embedded leadership coach. I work inside organizations, alongside the managers who lead from the middle.
How I Work
I do my best work in-house, on longer engagements, inside an organization. That means coaching multiple managers across the organization, rather than one at a time. This approach allows me to understand how this particular organization actually operates, and work long enough with managers to make a difference.
Most of what makes the coaching useful is not a single framework applied from outside. What is useful all depends on context. The same management challenge looks different in a two-hundred-year-old institution than in a seven-year-old technology company, and the coaching has to reflect that. Working across functions at the same time, I also see patterns no individual manager can: a problem surfacing in one team that has its real source in another, or a connected tension that three teams are each individually experiencing as their own. Making those dynamics visible, and workable, is the center of the job.
That same vantage point lets me hold up a mirror to the leadership team. Because I am working across the middle of the organization rather than from the top of it, I can see how strategy is landing once it reaches the people who have to activate it, and where the gap sits between what leadership intends and what teams are experiencing. Reflecting that back, honestly and without an agenda, is often where the work is most valuable to an organization.
Who is this for?
My approach to coaching managers and guiding leaders tends to fit mid-to-large organizations where the middle management layer is dealing with more change than ever before: a values reset, a reorganization, fast growth, a period where what is being asked of managers has outrun what they were prepared for. If that is the moment you are in, it is the moment I am most useful.
A note on Managers & AI
For years, managers have been over-focused on managing information. This was partly because it filled a real need, since without them the information would not reach the people who needed it, and partly because it was the measurable part of the job, the part you could optimize. But the impact of any good manager has always come through something else: how they set up the conditions for their people to thrive, not how well they relayed information. AI can now handle the relaying very well. What that reveals is not that the job was unnecessary, but that the real job was always the part underneath: setting direction when the answer is not obvious, holding trust together under pressure, having the conversations that do not have a script.
This is the shift I am watching happen up close, inside the day-to-day of the managers I work with. It is also one of the key topics I write about. AI is not making the manager's job smaller. It is making the hardest part of it the whole point. To me, this is good news.
My background
I spent more than twenty-five years working inside large organizations, much of it at Microsoft, across sales, marketing, services, and strategy. I led teams across international markets and held roles where I was accountable for results I could only partly control, working from a strategy I had not written. That is the real foundation for my coaching: it is grounded in having lived the role, but I am also trained in Organization and Relationship Systems Coaching (ORSC).
I am also the author of Guide Your Team to Success, a set of facilitation techniques for managers, with a second book on managers who lead from the middle on the way.
I am currently embedded as the internal leadership coach at a technology company of roughly 1,800 people, working with dozens of managers in 1:1 coaching and facilitating group sessions.
My point of view
I write about the middle of organizations: what the manager's job really means today. It is where I work things out in public, and the best place to see how I think. You can read it on Substack.
Get in touch
The first conversation is always exploratory. I want to understand what your organization is actually dealing with before proposing anything. If there is a fit, we go deeper from there. If there is not, I will tell you.