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About Emma
I’ve sat at the table. I know what gets avoided. And I know what becomes possible when a team stops pretending.
Leadership team coach. Thirty years in and around senior teams. Fifteen as a team member or leader. Fifteen supporting them.
My background
I didn’t start my career as a coach. I started in procurement and supply chain, and then leading local and global teams inside fast-moving commercial organisations. The kind of environments where the pressure is real, the priorities compete, and the stakes are high.
A £1m budget gap. Four weeks to close it. A team that hadn’t felt supported for months. That was probably the moment my real education in leading teams began.
What I noticed, in myself and in the teams around me, was that the challenge was rarely about strategy or capability. It was about how we worked together under pressure. Whether we could be honest with each other when it mattered. Whether we trusted each other enough to have the conversations that actually needed to happen.
That recognition shaped the work I do now. I moved into learning and development, then into leadership team coaching, drawn by the same question I kept returning to: what does it actually take for a group of capable people to lead well together?
Fifteen years. Many teams.
Since then, I’ve worked with executive and senior leadership teams across commercial organisations in the UK and internationally. Teams navigating post-restructure uncertainty. Global cross-cultural teams building something new from scratch. Teams that were high-performing on paper and quietly stuck in patterns that were costing them. And teams, frankly, on the brink of falling apart.
What I bring to every engagement is the same: calm, commercial credibility, and the willingness to name what’s actually happening, with care, not judgement. I notice what’s beneath the surface. I’ll name it. And then I’ll stay alongside while the team does something real with it.
The belief underneath the work
I believe that the quality of a leadership team’s conversations determines the quality of everything that follows. Not just performance but the culture, the decisions, the organisation’s ability to change and keep going.
I also believe that leadership today sits at the intersection of performance, humanity and sustainability. Not as separate agendas, but as one honest question: how do we lead in a way that’s genuinely good for people, good for the planet, and still commercially real? I’m an Ambassador for the Inner Development Goals, and I care about organisations moving sustainability from a reporting exercise into something that actually shapes how decisions get made. That starts, always, with the leadership team.
How I work
I work with a small number of clients at any one time. That’s deliberate. The work requires presence, not volume.
My approach is grounded in the belief that challenge and support aren’t opposites but rather they’re what real progress is made of. I’m direct. I’m warm. I bring thirty years of commercial experience and fifteen years of coaching into the room, and I’m not interested in leadership theatre or solutions that look polished on paper. I’m interested in what actually shifts.