I support people and organisations to pause, take stock, pay deeper attention and reconnect with what matters. Whether through leadership or personal development coaching, mentoring or organisational consultancy, my aim is to create spaces that support clarity of thinking and meaningful change, whilst maintaining integrity with the values espoused.
What Noesis Offers
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Confidential one-to-one support for individuals in purpose- or mission-driven contexts, often in the public sector or charities.
This takes the form of a confidential thinking partnership: a space to slow down, develop insight, test judgement, and refine actions. This often involves engaging with the deeper questions that accompany leadership and professional life.
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Capacity building and people mentoring within organisations, offered as workshops or team support on themes such as: leadership transition, profile development, or preparing for the next role.
This has taken the form of work across universities, including research lead development; aspects of REF metric preparation; wider academic career development; support and mentoring for senior or aspiring senior researchers navigating the intellectual, institutional, and personal demands of academic life.
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Bespoke ‘retreats’, courses and structured reflective spaces for leaders, teams, and organisations who need time away from pace and pressure, or training in a particular area.
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Advisory, facilitation or research work with a range of mission- and purpose-led organisations, e.g. where charities are reviewing their history, values and future mission or clarifying their sense of purpose together as a team or with stakeholders.
Such work may involved convening groups of stakeholders, data collection, research and report writing.
Noesis creates space for thoughtful conversation in which clarity, judgement, and wise action can emerge.
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Noesis creates space for thoughtful conversation in which clarity, judgement, and wise action can emerge. 〰️
Noesis Executive Coaching
The Noesis Way of Working
People come to coaching for different reasons: a role has changed, a decision is pressing, confidence has taken a knock, a working relationship has become difficult, or the next step is no longer obvious. Sometimes nothing in particular has gone wrong, but the responsibility itself is enough to require a different kind of conversation, somewhere to think without the immediate pressures of the role or the expectations of others shaping the conversation.
This is not a space for advice or pre-packaged solutions; it is a conversation in which we slow things down enough to notice what is actually happening in the situation itself; the demands it places upon you; the assumptions beneath it, and the possibilities that have not yet been properly seen.
Your situation may include navigating change or uncertainty, holding together competing expectations, making decisions where the implications are not straightforward, or finding a way forward when the situation feels more complex than it first appeared.
Such conversations can also be helpful when you are considering a change of direction, when relationships within an organisation are not straightforward, when confidence or energy has shifted, or when questions of purpose, identity or vocation begin to press more insistently.
At other times, the value lies simply in having a place where you can think honestly, without performance, and without needing to arrive at an answer too quickly, particularly where others are looking to you for clarity or direction.
Often, what is first brought into the conversation turns out not to be the whole story. A question about direction may become a question about identity. A leadership dilemma may involve values, courage, visibility or authority. A sense of being stuck may indicate that an established way of working, or an established understanding of yourself, has reached its limit. The work is to stay with these questions long enough for something more accurate to emerge.
My approach is reflective, calm, direct and quietly challenging. I listen carefully, and I will ask questions that help bring what is going on more fully into view, not to interrogate, but to clarify.
I am interested in the whole situation, not only the presenting problem. The person, the role, the organisation, the relationships, the history and the wider context all matter, particularly where leadership involves holding together people, purpose and institutional realities over time. This is not about making things more complicated than they need to be, it is simply what is required if the work is to move beyond surface answers.
As the conversation develops, certain questions tend to return in different forms. What is really happening here? What am I assuming? What am I not seeing? What matters most in this situation? What would wise action look like now? And sometimes more subtly, what kind of person or leader am I becoming through this?
Insight on its own is not the point. What matters is whether you are able to think more clearly about what you are facing, to act with greater deliberateness, and to exercise judgement in a way that is proportionate to the situation and attentive to those affected by it.
Format of the coaching engagement
Coaching tends to work best as a series of conversations over time. This allows us to build enough continuity and trust to explore your context properly, notice patterns as they emerge, and translate insight into thoughtful action.
I usually recommend a coaching engagement of between five and nine 75- to 90-minute conversations, spread over seven to twelve months. The exact shape is agreed together at the outset and reviewed as the work develops.
Fees are agreed according to context, including whether the coaching is individually funded or supported by an organisation.
Mentoring
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Mentoring *
Mentoring offers a setting in which experience, expertise and reflective conversation can be brought together in support of professional growth.
Unlike coaching, mentoring includes more direct sharing of knowledge, perspective and practical guidance. It is particularly valuable when individuals or teams are entering unfamiliar territory, developing an area of work, navigating professional transition or seeking an experienced external perspective on the challenges faced.
I provide mentoring that is thoughtful, relational and responsive to context. The purpose is not to prescribe a single way forward, but to help people draw upon informed guidance while developing their own confidence, judgement and capacity.
Individual mentoring
Individual mentoring provides sustained support around a particular role, project or stage of professional development. It may be helpful for those who are:
* taking on a new leadership, academic or professional responsibility;
* developing a grant application, publication or REF submission;
* moving between sectors (e.g. from school to university) or into a new institutional setting;
* seeking greater clarity about professional identity and direction.
* preparing for promotion, increased responsibility or managing a significant career transition e.g. after redundancy or retirement;
* managing the competing demands of leadership, scholarship and organisational life.
Much of our mentoring work has taken place within universities, supporting academics, researchers and professional staff with research development, publication, career progression and institutional change. The same approach can be adapted for leaders and professionals in education, charities, faith-based organisations and the wider public sector.
Team mentoring
Teams sometimes need more than facilitation or training. They may benefit from an ongoing relationship with someone who can help them reflect upon their work, learn from experience and develop greater confidence in their collective judgement.
Team mentoring can support:
* newly formed or changing teams;
* research and project groups;
* leadership teams undertaking a significant programme of development;
* teams working across professional or organisational boundaries;
* colleagues seeking to strengthen collaboration, shared purpose and mutual accountability;
* groups developing a publication, strategy, curriculum or new area of practice.
The work may involve a series of structured conversations over several months, creating continuity while allowing the focus to develop as the team’s work progresses.
Every mentoring relationship begins with a conversation about purpose, expectations and the kind of support that would be most useful. Arrangements may be designed for an individual, an established team or a small group of people facing similar professional questions.
At its best, mentoring helps people feel less alone in demanding work. It offers the benefit of experience without removing responsibility, enabling individuals and teams to think more clearly, act with greater confidence and continue developing their own distinctive practice.
Good organisations are not simply efficient, they are places where people develop and flourish whilst navigating complexity with integrity, remaining faithful to their purpose while responding to change.
Periods of growth, uncertainty or transition often raise questions that cannot be answered internally within the organisation. They require the facilitation of careful thought, honest conversations and patiently drawn out insight.
I offer consultancy that creates space for this kind of thinking. We work alongside organisations as a thought partner, bringing together leadership experience, academic research and a deep understanding of how people, culture and purpose shape organisational life.
This work is collaborative and co-creative, rather than prescriptive. I listen carefully, ask searching questions, offer informed challenge and help organisations gain greater clarity about who they are, what matters most and how they wish to move forward.
Consultancy may include:
* Strategic reflection and organisational review.
* Leadership and governance development.
* Facilitation of leadership away days and strategic conversations.
* Organisational culture, ethos and values reviews.
* Support through organisational change, growth and restructuring.
* Research-informed advice on education, leadership, religion and organisational culture.
* Designing reflective learning and development for leadership teams.
* Keynote speaking and workshops on leadership, flourishing, organisational identity and change.
Every organisation is unique. Rather than offering standard consultancy packages, I begin with a conversation, seeking first to understand your context before designing support that reflects your priorities, aspirations and challenges.
The purpose is not simply to solve problems, but to help organisations think well, act wisely and flourish over the long term.