Lead with Your Values

I am a coach who works with leaders who seek to make a positive impact in the world. Whether you are an experienced leader or managing others for the first time, what excites me about working with you is your potential to make a positive and lasting impact on the people you lead.

In 2010 I took on a leadership role for the first time, supervising a team of public school liaisons in courthouses around New York City. Just after I began in the role, a judge told me that she thought the liaisons’ hours should all match the hours of public operation for the courthouses they worked in. Some of the team worked 8 to 4 and others worked 9 to 5, so I told my team that all of them had to work a 9 to 5 schedule in accordance with courthouse hours.  As they expressed their displeasure with both the decision’s logic and its impact on their personal lives, I felt a wrenching pain in my lower back. This developed into an injury that I rehabilitated over the following six months. 

I was out of alignment with my values, and my back had let me know it. I had deferred to the prestige of the judge’s position and made a unilateral decision, which was fundamentally at odds with my belief in collaborative decision-making and establishing a culture of trust. (Later, after realizing that courthouse hours were more variable than I first thought and that the change in hours had no actual impact on their work, I returned to allowing the team the flexibility to determine their schedule.)

This younger version of myself would have deeply benefitted from a coach to help him find clarity in his motives, goals, and approach to management. By extension, the staff I managed, the people they served, and even their families at home, would have benefitted as well. Even a small leadership decision, like a slight shift in my team’s schedules, has real and lasting ripple effects. Given our impact, the world needs leaders who are values-driven, transparent, and authentic.

Fortunately, I found other ways to learn and grow as a leader over the past 15 years. Managing continues to be the most challenging and rewarding thing I have done in my career. I now deeply understand that relationship and connection rests at the beginning, middle and end of impactful leadership.

As coach, I am my clients’ fierce supporter as they continuously learn to become better leaders. I coach on whatever needs emerge, because blind spots are the same whether we are in our homes or our workplaces. In fact, one will always impact the other. 

When you work with me, I coach the whole of you, so that the leader and person you emerge as will thrive in ways you have not yet imagined. 

I coach for transformation.