About me
I didn't set out to coach tech leaders. I set out to solve complex problems and have fun doing it.
For fifteen years, deep tech was my world. Low-level cellular communications, bespoke solutions, wacky collaborative projects, genuinely hard problems that had never been solved before. I loved it. I still do. And at Cambridge Consultants, one of the most respected deep-tech innovators in the world, I got to do it alongside some of the most talented engineers I've ever met.
But steadily along the way, I grew in another direction. I started noticing that the most interesting challenges weren't the technical ones. They were the human ones. How do you help a brilliant engineer scale beyond themselves without losing what made them brilliant? How do you build a team that doesn't just deliver, but actually thrives? How do you approach that tough conversation everyone's been avoiding?
I took over as head of my own group and led it through a period of serious growth, from 5 to 20+ people, interns through to technology directors. And the thing that gave me the most satisfaction wasn't the engineering wins. It was watching people grow into leaders they didn't know they could be.
Other groups started noticing. Not HR, the actual teams who wanted to do better. They came to me for hiring training because of what they could see happening in my group. When I eventually left that role, one of the future leaders I'd worked with told me: "You lead so well. You ask amazing questions." I've carried that with me ever since.
That feedback pointed at something I'd been deliberately building for years: not just technical expertise, but genuine people craft. I've trained in listening and helping people think, rather than defaulting to telling them what I would do. I've honed that practice in some unexpected places too: conducting, and sailing, where reading a group, making fast decisions with incomplete information, and keeping people confident under pressure turn out to be surprisingly transferable skills.
I focus on the first leadership leap because it's the hardest one. Not because it's the most stratospheric, but because it's the most dramatic. Everything that made you successful as an engineer, your instinct to dive in, to fix, to own the outcome, has to be rethought from scratch. Done well, this transition can unlock someone who becomes an extraordinary leader. Left unsupported, the same person might conclude it's not for them, or struggle in silence until it all falls apart. That gap is where I do my best work.
The moments I remember most aren't the big realisations. They're the ones where a client has done the work, built a clearer picture of what's actually going on around them, and starts to operate differently because of it. One client came to understand that the people around her already saw her potential, but that alone wasn't enough. What changed things was demolishing the assumptions, building a new plane of thinking, and getting comfortable with it. That's what this work actually looks like.
If there's a complex problem you'd like to solve, I'd love to have a conversation.