Coaching for senior academic leaders
The move into academic leadership is one of the least supported transitions in higher education. I work with the people making it.
You were appointed for your expertise. The role asks for something else
Becoming a Head of Department, Dean, or Pro-Vice-Chancellor is often framed as recognition - the reward for a distinguished academic career. And it is. But the day the role begins, a different set of demands arrives, and almost none of them are the ones a research career prepared you for.
Leading colleagues who are also experts, and who did not necessarily choose to be led by you. Holding accountability conversations with former peers. Navigating institutional politics. Managing budgets, restructures, and people, while the metrics never stop.
The skills that made you exceptional in your field (depth, independence, intellectual rigour) don't automatically transfer to the relational and political work the role now requires. And higher education provides remarkably little structured support for senior leaders making this shift.
If you've found academic leadership harder and lonelier than the academic work that preceded it, you're not failing at it. You're encountering the part of it that nobody prepared you for.
What coaching actually does
This is not advice, and it is not mentoring. I won't tell you how to run your faculty or hand you a leadership framework to apply.
Coaching is a structured, confidential space in which you can think more clearly about the role than is possible anywhere else in academic life. The work is psychologically grounded, intellectually rigorous, and built around you - your situation, your patterns, the specific reality you're navigating. It is independent of your institution's management and governance; what's discussed stays between us.
Academic leaders often bring these themes to coaching:
The transition into Head of Department, Dean, or PVC, and the identity shift it demands
Leading colleagues who are themselves experts, and former peers
The loneliness of senior academic leadership
Decision-making under research-income and metrics pressure
Restructure, redundancy, and difficult conversations in collegial cultures
Conflict aversion, and what it costs at senior level
Imposter feelings in roles that academic excellence didn't prepare them for
The aim is not just insight. It is durable change in how you lead - and how you experience leading.
Why work with me
I'm a Chartered Psychologist (CPsychol) and an ILM Level 7 executive coach, with a PhD and twenty years working inside complex organisations including universities and national research bodies.
The PhD is not incidental. Academic leaders engage differently with someone who has done serious research and understands the culture from inside it - the peer-review reflex, the value placed on rigour, the scepticism toward anything that sounds like management consultancy. I bring genuine psychological depth and an academic sensibility, not a generic coaching toolkit.
My background includes senior leadership at the NIHR Research Delivery Network - the national infrastructure supporting clinical and health research, working alongside academic clinicians and research-intensive institutions. I understand the world you operate in: the matrix accountability, the expert colleagues, the gaps between values and rewards.
“We already have coaching and OD provision — why bring in someone external?”
It's a fair question, and institutional coaching and academic development provision are genuinely valuable. They build capability and support leaders across the institution in ways external coaching doesn't.
But an internal coach, however skilled, operates inside the same institution you do - the same faculty politics, the same committees, the same web of relationships and reputations. They have their own position in the structure. Even with complete integrity, that creates a ceiling on what can be said without consequence.
At senior level, the things that most need examining are often exactly the ones you can't raise internally: the doubts about a strategic direction you're expected to champion, the difficulty of a colleague relationship, the uncertainty you can't show to a department looking to you for steadiness.
External coaching does something different - not better in every respect, but different in a way that matters: complete psychological safety. No agenda, no institutional memory, no risk that what you surface quietly reshapes how a colleague or a committee sees you. Institutional provision builds capability; external coaching creates the conditions for the thinking that's hardest to do when you're embedded in the very system you're trying to lead.
How it works
All coaching is delivered online, which makes sustained senior coaching practical around a demanding role - no travel, no time lost. Sessions are 60 minutes.
Two engagement options:
Starter: £1,250
Four sessions over 3 months. Suited to a specific transition, decision, or challenge with a defined focus.
Full: £2,250
Seven sessions over 6 months. Suited to sustained work through a significant transition or an extended period of complexity and pressure.
Team coaching
Individual sessions for each member of a senior leadership team, aligned, if wished, to collective outcomes agreed at the outset. Priced to your brief.
Questions academic leaders ask
Will you understand the academic context?
Yes. I hold a PhD, have co-authored peer-reviewed work, and have spent over fifteen years in and around universities and national research leadership. I understand the culture, the pressures, and the particular character of academic leadership - including why it differs from leadership in other sectors.
Is this confidential and independent of my institution?
Entirely. The coaching is independent of your institution's management and governance. What's discussed stays between us. That independence is part of what makes the space genuinely useful.
I'm performing well - is coaching still relevant?
Coaching is not remediation. The academic leaders who benefit most are usually doing well and want to lead more deliberately, navigate a transition more skilfully, or think more clearly under pressure. It's a marker of seriousness about the role, not a sign of difficulty.
Can my institution fund this?
Often, yes. Academic leadership development budgets, faculty or departmental funds, and institutional OD budgets can all apply. If it helps, I can provide a short briefing setting out the case for the investment in terms a senior team or committee will recognise.
What happens in a chemistry session?
It's a 30-minute conversation, online, at no cost and with no obligation. The purpose is genuinely to establish whether the fit is right - most people find the conversation itself useful regardless of whether it leads anywhere.
Start with a conversation
A chemistry session is the best way to explore whether coaching is right for you. 30 minutes, online, no cost, no obligation. We'll talk about what you're navigating and whether I'm the right person to think it through with.