About Mike
Mike works with senior executives leading large-scale change. His coaching is grounded in the reality of that work, the pressure, the responsibility, and the often unseen complexity that comes with it. This appreciation comes from a career spent at the intersection of strategy, leadership, and transformation, holding senior roles at J.P. Morgan, McKinsey & Company, and Virgin Australia Group.
Mike began his professional life as a Commissioned Officer in the UK Royal Navy, training at Britannia Royal Naval College. He first qualified as a leadership coach in 2007 and has integrated coaching into his work ever since, not as a separate discipline, but as part of how he supports leaders to navigate complexity, make decisions, and stay grounded in moments that matter.
At McKinsey & Company, Mike spent eight years working closely with CEOs and leadership teams through periods of significant change. His support focused on helping executives navigate ambiguity, balance competing demands, and lead growth, cost, digital, and organisational transformations.
He was certified as a top team facilitator and executive coach at McKinsey and brought this work together in co-authoring the Firm’s research on psychological safety. Responsible for McKinsey’s leadership development practice, he designed and delivered programs that supported the development of leaders across public, private, and social sectors to strengthen their leadership in complex, high-stakes settings.
Mike supports leaders who want to become a source of growth for the people around them - building capability, capacity, and uplifting teams - or in other words, supporting executives in becoming developmental leaders.
Today, Mike continues to work as both a transformation advisor and executive coach, supporting Executive Leadership Teams, CEOs, and Boards.
Working with Mike
Working with Mike is less about receiving answers and more about developing the capacity to find better ones.
What distinguishes Mike's coaching is the range of experience he brings to bear. His early career in the Navy - navigating warships in uncertain and at times combat conditions - forged a disposition for clear thinking under pressure. That foundation was deepened through years working on complex, high-stakes challenges across public and private sector organisations, and through his time at McKinsey & Company, where he worked alongside senior executives on some of the most consequential problems organisations face.
But it's the years spent designing and delivering leadership development for senior executives around the world that most directly shape how Mike coaches today. He stands on the shoulders of established bodies of work - Adaptive Leadership, Immunity to Change, Vertical Development, and the creation of psychologically safe environments - not as frameworks to be applied mechanically, but as lenses for helping leaders understand how they're thinking, not just what they're doing. This distinction matters. Many of the challenges senior leaders face aren't purely technical problems to be solved with sharper strategy. They're adaptive challenges that require a shift in how you lead.
Mike creates the conditions for that kind of work. Sessions are patient and deliberate, with space for the kind of reflection that's hard to access in the noise of daily leadership. Clients describe partnerships with Mike as both grounding and expanding, a sense of being met with care and respect, alongside a genuine invitation to grow into a broader range of leadership capacities.
The result is coaching that holds two things at once; the rigour to work clearly through complex challenges and the depth to examine what might be limiting how you lead.
How the work takes shape
Sometimes a single session is exactly what's needed. When you're navigating a particularly wicked challenge, one well-structured conversation can work on two levels simultaneously; exploring different ways to think about the technical dimensions of the problem while also examining how you're showing up to it as a leader. The outcome isn't just a clearer path forward, it's a more expansive version of how you are approaching the work to be done.
More often, the most significant work unfolds over a longer arc. A six-session partnership - typically paced every two to three weeks - is designed for leaders taking on a substantial transformation agenda, or stepping into a more expansive role that asks something new of them. Each session takes a meaningful slice of that larger challenge. You make progress on the agenda itself, and in parallel, you develop the leadership capacity the context is demanding.
