When Your Smartest Leader Is Also Your Riskiest
They're working 70-hour weeks. Their team can't move without them. And they're three months from either burning out or becoming so toxic that your top performers start leaving.
This is what happens when technical brilliance scales into leadership without support.
Two Paths to Transformation
01
One Leader Is the Risk
02
THE TEAM ISN'T A TEAM
Where's the real bottleneck?
One person drowning: Your smartest leader is working 70-hour weeks, every decision escalates to them, and they're three months from burnout. → Individual Advisory
The whole system stuck: Numbers look fine but decisions loop endlessly, strategic plans fragment, and the leadership team feels professionally polite but emotionally disconnected. → Team Transformation
Not sure? Start with a diagnostic conversation.
WHAT CLIENTS ARE SAYING
"Technical brilliance doesn't make you a leader. Catherine transforms founders into true executives by developing the all-round skills you actually need to scale—not just the ones you think you need. She'll call out your blind spots and show you exactly how to fix them."
— Flemming Bengsten, Founder, Chief Revenue Officer
You Can't Read the Label From Inside the Tin
individual ADVISORY: UPGRADING THE OPERATING SYSTEM:
Your technical expert was competent leading 5 people. At 50+ people, they're drowning:
Midnight escalations because every decision needs their input
Strategic initiatives frozen while they manage operational details
Team attrition rising - high performers won't tolerate micromanagement
Succession risk exploding - everything depends on one exhausted brain
Board meetings derailed by operational firefighting
You've tried feedback. Delegation training. Leadership development programs.
Nothing sticks because the problem isn't skills. It's about identity.
The Compound Cost of Inaction
Month 1-3:
Team morale drops, decisions slow, innovation stalls
Month 4-6:
First resignation from their team (£150k replacement cost)
Month 7-9:
They burn out or rage quit (£600-900k replacement cost)
Month 10-12:
Cascade effect - 3-4 more departures, strategic failure
Total organisational damage: £3-5M in direct costs, lost productivity, and strategic delays.
Meanwhile, your organisation develops learned helplessness. Teams stop thinking. Everything becomes about managing up to the bottleneck.
When Being Brilliant Becomes the Problem
The shift required: From "I'm valuable because I have all the answers" to "I'm valuable because I build systems that generate answers."
This addresses why brilliant technical experts can't let go, why they trust code more than people, and why their perfectionism is killing your scale.
WHAT CLIENTS ARE SAYING
"Catherine step-changed individuals, teams, and our approach to developing leaders. She's a trusted advisor in the moments that matter both organisationally and personally."
— Mary Pizzey, Commercial Strategy Leader
For individual leaders:
Strategic Retained Advisory
The work is structured as ongoing retained advisory. Investment discussed after initial diagnostic reveals scope and organisational impact.
Initial Diagnostic:
Organisational assessment - 6-8 stakeholder interviews mapping impact patterns of the leader
Dashboard and metrics analysis - Understanding decision-making architecture
Leadership observation - Shadowing critical meetings to see dynamics they can't name
System evaluation - Identifying what drives their behaviour and where the gaps are
Ongoing Engagement:
Identity architecture - Rewiring core beliefs creating bottlenecks
Systems building - Decision frameworks that evolve with growth
Leadership evolution - Adapting as new challenges emerge at scale
Impact measurement - Tracked through existing dashboards plus behavioural indicators
Most engagements evolve over years, not months. As your leaders solve one level of complexity, new challenges emerge. The advisory relationship continues as long as you're scaling this business.
Engagement includes:
2x monthly 90-minute strategic sessions
Between-session counsel when high-stakes decisions emerge
Stakeholder feedback loops
The work shifts from crisis intervention to capability building to succession planning to board readiness as new complexity emerges. This is not a time-bound program as it’s advisory that evolves with your organisation's needs.
Team TRANSFORMATION:
WHEN THE SYSTEM NEEDS REWIRING
When Performance Looks ‘Fine’ But Something Feels Broken
The numbers are on track. Your leadership team is a bunch of talented individuals. But decisions loop endlessly. Strategic plans fragment because each leader interprets them differently. Functions operate in silos. Relationships at the top have become professionally polite but emotionally detached.
You've tried away days, communication training, strategy resets. Nothing shifts because you can't fix a system problem by coaching one node.
This Is Systems Work
Most team coaching focuses on fixing individuals like communication skills, decision-making styles, leadership behaviours. But that's rarely where the real issue lives.
This approach is grounded in systems coaching - a discipline that sees the team itself as a living system with its own intelligence, patterns, and blind spots. Instead of coaching people one by one, I help the system see itself: how trust is built, how tension moves, what gets said and what doesn't, which roles people unconsciously occupy, where power actually lives versus where it's supposed to.
When a team can observe its own dynamics in real time, that's when transformation happens. Because once a team can self-regulate, it doesn't need constant external intervention. It becomes capable of course-correcting, reconnecting, and realigning on its own.
That's the difference between a facilitated offsite and genuine transformation. You don't just get better conversations. You get a team that knows how to lead itself.
The Process
Phase 1: Diagnostic & Commitment Decision
The diagnostic includes 8-10 stakeholder interviews (board members, the leadership team itself, and key staff) to understand the team's actual impact not just how they describe themselves. I'm listening for hidden agreements, unspoken tensions, misaligned expectations, and the "inner roles" each person occupies.
I also observe the team in action like shadowing leadership meetings to see dynamics they can't name while they're living inside them.
The diagnostic culminates in a full-day off-site workshop where I debrief findings with the team. We surface what's been unsaid, create team agreements, and critically the team chooses whether to continue. This commitment decision matters. Transformation requires the whole team showing up for the work, not just the CEO wanting them to change.
Phase 2: 6-Month Team Development
Monthly day workshops (off-site) focused on:
Surfacing and resolving hidden assumptions about success, authority, and expectations
Building capacity for candid conversations without defaulting to conflict avoidance or aggression
Clarifying decision rights and role boundaries to reduce overlap and anxiety
Creating shared language and collective understanding of how the team operates at its best
Establishing sustainable rhythms for how the team self-corrects when dynamics slip
Between sessions, the team commits to practicing new agreements, addressing tensions as they arise, and holding each other accountable.
Investment: Structured in two phases : diagnostic engagement, then 6-month transformation. Scope and investment discussed during initial consultation based on team size and organisational complexity.
All sessions held off-site. The team cannot do this work in their normal office environment.
What Changes When the System Rewrites
"Before team coaching, I considered drastic measures like recruiting a new board or even selling the company. We needed a reboot but didn't know what that was. We were senior managers, not senior leaders. As a result of this process, we created an ambitious strategy and restructured the company. Employees now tell us that we are rock solid with a single purpose, vision, and voice."
— Andrew Reynolds, CEO
"As a CEO, you can carry a lot of the world on your shoulders. Team coaching is perfect for when you are frustrated, carrying huge anxiety, not enjoying your job, and your team isn't functioning as a team. What was important was having someone external to force us to reflect on unpleasant things, giving us space we wouldn't give ourselves. This allowed us to heal rifts and become happier about a future we could all be certain about."
— Matt Cheung, CEO
"I started as a skeptic and ended up a convert. Catherine helped our board work significantly better as a team. She allowed us to acknowledge strengths and weaknesses, which led to a more harmonious and effective entity."
— Dean Sheehy, Operations Director & Board member
Willingness from the entire leadership team to examine how they operate together, not just as individuals
Commitment to off-site sessions where real reflection can happen
Openness to discomfort - this is not training where you learn frameworks and leave. This is transformation work that surfaces what the team has been avoiding
Leadership sponsor (typically CEO or Board Chair) who recognises that individual development without collective alignment creates disconnection
Recognition that transformation takes time - you're changing a system, not attending a workshop
This Work Requires
Individual or Team?
If you're already working with me in 1:1 advisory and discover your leadership team needs intervention, we pause individual work and shift to team transformation.
Why: Coaching the senior leader while simultaneously coaching their team creates complex dynamics—perceived collusion, insider information, split loyalty. The system needs to transform together, not have one person ahead while others catch up.
Most effective sequence: Team transformation first, then individual advisory for specific leaders as new complexity emerges.
Next Step
Initial diagnostic consultation to determine fit and design the engagement.
We'll discuss the specific dysfunction you're seeing, map the organisational cost of continuing, and whether this approach addresses your situation.