Leadership Coaching for Academics and Researchers

Make more deliberate choices about your leadership, your career and the life you want to lead

You’ve worked hard to establish yourself as a researcher. You’ve developed expertise, built relationships and taken on increasing responsibility for people, projects and funding. But with so many demands on your time and attention, it can be difficult to find the space to think about what you really want and how best to achieve it.

Perhaps you’re managing a research team, considering promotion or wondering where to focus your efforts next. Your career might look as if it’s going well by conventional measures, but you’re beginning to question whether the way you’re working is sustainable or satisfying.

You don’t necessarily need to work harder or take on more. You may need the opportunity to hear yourself think, challenge some assumptions and make more intentional choices about where you invest your time, energy and expertise.

Get in touch: click here if you’d like to discuss your options!

When can coaching be helpful?

As your experience and responsibilities grow, so do the demands on your time, attention and energy. Opportunities emerge, priorities shift and the things that once motivated you may no longer feel quite so important.

You may be enjoying a successful career while recognising that something needs to change.

Sometimes there’s a specific issue you want to resolve. Sometimes you have a sense that something could be different, even if you can’t yet articulate what that might look like. Coaching gives you the opportunity to explore those questions with someone who understands the academic environment but isn’t caught up in the expectations and politics of your institution.

You don’t have to know exactly what you want to change before we begin. Working that out can be part of the process.

Create your own coaching path or follow my Core Leadership programme.

Get in touch: click here if you’d like to discuss your options!

Every coaching relationship is tailored, common themes include:

Perhaps you’re…

Leading people and projects and finding that supporting everyone else leaves too little time for your own research and professional ambitions.
Considering your next career move, whether that’s promotion, a new role, a different research direction or deciding that you’re happy where you are.
Trying to become more strategic, stepping away from the constant demands of the day-to-day to decide what deserves your attention and what you could stop doing.
Developing your influence and visibility, wanting your ideas and contributions to be recognised without feeling that you have to become someone you’re not.
Navigating difficult relationships or expectations, particularly when you carry considerable responsibility without always having the authority or resources to match.
Reconsidering what success means, wanting to do challenging, meaningful work and make a valuable contribution while having enough time and energy for the rest of your life.

The most profound transformations happen when you invest in growth rather than using duct tape to hold things together. A programme is designed to help you explore who you are, what you want and how to achieve it.

What can you expect from working with me?

Coaching gives you something that’s often in short supply in academic life: time and space to step away from immediate demands, think more strategically and consider what really matters.

But our conversations are more than an opportunity to talk things through.

I bring over 20 years of experience as an academic, alongside my work as a coach, mentor and leadership development facilitator. I understand the opportunities and pressures of research careers, the complexities of academic institutions and the challenges of moving from being an expert in your field to leading people and projects.

My approach combines thoughtful questions, honest challenge and practical support. I’ll help you see a familiar situation from a different perspective or explore the assumptions or expectations influencing your choices. And with permission, I’ll share relevant experience, ideas or tools that can help you find a way forward.

I won’t tell you what your career or leadership should look like.

That’s for you to decide.

What I will do is help you develop the self-knowledge, skills and professional judgement to make those decisions more confidently and intentionally.

We may work on an immediate challenge, a longer-term ambition or questions about what success means to you now. As your circumstances change, our focus can change too.

The aim isn’t to create a perfect career plan and follow it rigidly. It’s to help you become better equipped to navigate your professional life, make meaningful contributions and create space for the life you want beyond work.

Individual Leadership & Career Coaching

Sometimes you need sustained support to make a change or an important decision arises and you want to think it through with someone who knows you and understands your professional world.

My individual coaching is designed to accommodate both.

We work with the questions you’re facing, not a predetermined list of lessons. You may want to improve the way you lead a team, decide whether to seek promotion, regain some control over your research time or reconsider the direction of your career… We can address the immediate issue while also noticing the patterns, choices and assumptions that shape what happens next.

Getting Started: Build Momentum:
For a new coaching relationship, I usually recommend an initial three months, with two conversations a month. Six sessions give us an opportunity to understand the context, test approaches between meetings and review what’s changing. It’s enough time for more than a useful conversation, without demanding a long open-ended commitment.

Continuing coaching: support when it is useful:
After that initial period, you may want to maintain a regular rhythm or return for a short block when a new challenge or decision arises. We can agree a pace that suits your needs and available funding; there is no expectation that every client needs coaching indefinitely.

Essential Accountability package

Up to 100 minutes a month
Typically two Zoom calls
Keeps you on track
£250.00 per month

Get me on your team!

Buy your coaching now

Prefer structured Leadership learning? You have two choices.

1: Explore the “Core Leadership” package.

Not everyone wants or needs individual coaching. If you’re looking for a more structured way to develop your leadership skills, Core Leadership offers self-guided online learning, with recorded teaching and reflective journals you can work through at your own pace.

It’s particularly useful if you’re moving from expertise into greater responsibility for people and projects, or want to develop your approach to leadership before the next opportunity arrives. The programme draws on the foundations of my Leading From Expertise programme, which I deliver through Training for Universities, but this is designed for individual study.

Core Leadership is currently £297. Coaching is not included, but you can include individual coaching separately if you would value support applying what you learn.

You can use the Core Leadership Essentials, self-guided content – video and reflective journals – to learn the basics yourself. This is great value if you’re just curious or know you’re a self-starter who can work through programme content.

You can find more information on the “Core Leadership” programme content here.

2: Research Navigator: Teaching the parts of the job nobody explains.
Being good at the work is necessary. On its own, that’s rarely enough — but no one ever tells you that.
The researchers who secure the next contract, win the fellowship or get trusted with more responsibility have usually learned another set of skills alongside the research itself: skills nobody puts on a syllabus.

Research Navigator gives you a growing library of practical resources for the situations researchers actually encounter: visibility, leadership, workload, confidence, relationships and career direction. Plus access to my experience — more than 20 years inside academia and a decade as a coach and mentor – with regular co-working sessions and monthly live coaching calls.

Access Research Navigator for £20/month. Explore Research Navigator and join here.

Everything in the Library is open to you from the day you join. Nothing’s drip-fed, nothing to wait for.

The practicalities

Geography isn’t important. We work with telephone and video (Zoom) coaching.

It’s my job to make this as easy as possible! Coaching always starts with a short phone/Zoom call to make sure we are a good fit for each other. Take the time to hear yourself think.

You’ve already invested a great deal in becoming the professional you are. You may now want some space to consider how to make the best of your experience, your opportunities and the years ahead.

If it would be helpful to explore what coaching could offer you, I’d be pleased to have a conversation.

Get in touch: click here if you’d like to discuss your options!

See a copy of the coaching conditions and agreement form here.

“The more insecure or inadequate you feel, the more this programme will help you. The work is effortless but the rewards are extreme. There are no (obvious) challenges, just supportive invitations to practice thinking differently.”

If you have any further questions about coaching, please do get in touch!

As a member of the Association For Coaching, all my work is according to the code of ethics which sets the expectation of best practice in coaching and mentoring.