Organisations and their leaders are under more pressure than ever. Across every sector, they are having to lead and navigate the interconnected environmental, social and technological disruptions that are reshaping our world.
Under that pressure, the relational and reflective capacities organisations most need are often the first to be squeezed out. But performance and reflection are not opposites. When the aliveness of the work goes, so in time does the performance. Attending to the relational and reflective life of an organisation is not a retreat from results. It is often what makes them sustainable.
My work is supporting ways to keep meaning, purpose and connection alive, especially when pressure pushes them out.
I am an Organisational Consultant and Executive Coach at Tavistock Consulting, part of the Tavistock Centre, where I also lecture on the Masters in Consulting and Leading in Organisations. My approach is grounded in systems psychodynamics. I work with the unconscious patterns, relational tensions and systemic forces that can get in the way of even the soundest strategy and strongest skills. The aim is leadership that pays attention to what happens inside us, outside us, and between us.
I have a particular interest in how identity and difference operate in organisational life, and in the dynamics of power and authority that shape whose contributions count and whose go missing. This includes working with leaders from marginalised identities navigating those dynamics, and a specific interest in neurodiversity and leadership, including my own experience as a dyslexic thinker.
Before consultancy, I led a Mental Health Advisory Service in higher education and spent more than a decade in clinical work with students. That experience shaped how I think about leadership, responsibility and care.
I work with public service and mission driven organisations, including the NHS, higher education, housing and charities, as well as commercial organisations. What connects them is a wish to keep learning, and to sustain health and aliveness in organisational life.
Selected writing
MA with Distinction, Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust · EMCC Global Senior Practitioner · BACP accredited counsellor and supervisor · Member of ISPSO