It started with a wage slip.
In 1998, I took my first full time job in HR as a Wage Clerk in a manufacturing company, processing weekly wages for around 400 employees. I didn't know it then, but that was the beginning of a 26-year journey through some of South Africa's most dynamic industries, through every level of the HR function, and eventually, to building a practice of my own.
The path took me through manufacturing, telecommunications, financial services, retail, and travel and tourism. It took me from wage clerk to HR Officer, HR Manager, and ultimately Chief Human Capital Officer. It took me across borders managing HR for offices in Botswana, Namibia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and the UK. And in 2019, while still serving as CHRO, it took me in a direction I hadn't anticipated: into coaching.
Four years since stepping out on my own, I've arrived at what I
now call my sweet spot. And I want to share what that means and why it matters for the people and
organisations I work with.
The HR Foundation: Built From The Ground Up
There's something significant about having started at the very bottom of the HR function. I didn't arrive at the CHRO level with a theoretical understanding of what people at the coalface experience, I lived it. I've processed payroll, handled CCMA cases, recruited and inducted employees, written job descriptions, navigated union relationships, and sat on retirement fund trustee committees.
Over the years, I built expertise across every dimension of HR: employment equity, BBBEE, performance management, succession planning, talent development, change management, policy development, and executive reporting. As an HR Manager, I learned how to report to the Boards of both the local entities and their overseas parent company. As CHRO for a major tourism group, I improved the organisation's BBBEE score from Level 6 to Level 2 in a single year and built performance management and succession planning processes from scratch.
This breadth (from the operational to the strategic and from the individual employee to the boardroom) shaped my understanding of how organisations really work. And, more importantly, what gets in the way of people doing their best work.
I came to understand something that most people only see from
one angle: the person sitting in that manager’s chair is often struggling. Not because they lack ability, but because no
one has developed them as a leader, and
the systems around them aren’t designed to support them either.
The Coaching Discovery
In 2019, I was still serving as CHRO when I encountered coaching and very quickly I became deeply drawn to. I enrolled in formal coaching programmes, earned my qualifications, and began coaching part-time alongside my executive role.
While I was aware of how people fit into and impacted a system, and while most of my HR career had been spent working at the level of systems, structures, and strategy. Coaching asked me to work at the level of the individual, to pay attention to their inner world, their beliefs, their patterns, and their potential. It was a completely different kind of conversation, and it was transformative to witness.
By the end of 2021, I made the decision to leave corporate life and in
September 2022, I committed to my coaching practice full-time. I hold a
Certified Life Coach qualification and a Professional Business Coaching
qualification, and I am an Associate Certified Coach accredited by the
International Coaching Federation. I didn’t do these to tick the boxes. They represented a genuine and committed
transition into a new chapter.
The Three Boxes I Kept Seperate
When I launched my practice, I initially only focused on life coaching and leadership coaching. Based on client requests, I added on leadership development and training, and because I missed HR, I added HR consulting to my suite of services.
At first, it felt natural to organise my work into these three distinct offerings, each drawing on a different part of my background:
With Leadership Coaching, I did one-on-one work with individuals to build self-awareness, leadership effectiveness, and personal growth.
With Leadership Development, I designed and facilitated programmes that build leadership capability across teams and organisations.
With HR Consulting, I advised businesses on the people systems, structures, and practices that enable their workforce to thrive.
I had three offerings, which had three different client profiles. This meant that I would have three separate conversations about three different versions of what I could bring to a client.
What I didn't see yet but slowly became impossible to ignore, was that these three disciplines were always interconnected. I had just never allowed them to be.
The Pattern That Changed Everything
It crept up gradually. I would do powerful coaching work with a leader. I would help them develop real clarity, confidence, and intentionality only to watch them return to an organisation that wasn't designed to support what they'd just discovered. There were no clear performance conversations, no succession thinking, and definitely no alignment between what was expected of leaders and what the people systems were built to reinforce.
The coaching was working. The individual was growing. But the environment had a ceiling.
And from the other direction, I would consult on HR systems by building frameworks, policies, and processes. But I recognised that without leadership development, those systems would never be fully adopted. Without coaching, the leaders responsible for driving them would continue to lead in ways that undermined the very culture those systems were designed to create.
Each discipline, in isolation, was valuable. I soon realised that together, they were a lot more powerful.
So, after four years in practice, and 26 years of experience, I
finally gave myself permission to stop keeping them in separate boxes.
Where All Three Intersect
Here is what I now understand about these three disciplines, and why their integration is at the heart of what I offer:
Leadership Coaching develops the individual from the inside out. It builds self-awareness, emotional intelligence, and the capacity to lead with intention. It creates the kind of lasting behavioural change that ripples outward into teams and organisations. It asks the questions that no performance review or HR framework ever does.
Leadership Development takes that individual growth and scales it. It builds leadership as a collective capability, not a personal trait of a few, but a shared practice embedded across the business. It gives managers the tools, language, and confidence to lead consistently and well.
HR Consulting provides the structural foundation that makes all of it sustainable. Performance management, succession planning, talent pipelines, role clarity, policies, and people practices are the systems that either enable leadership to thrive or quietly undermine it. Getting these right is not a separate exercise from developing leaders. It is part of the same work.
When all three are aligned, when a leader is being coached while their team is being developed and the organisation's systems are designed to support and sustain that growth, something genuinely powerful becomes possible.
The leader grows, the team grows and the organisation is built to hold that growth. And that's the sweet spot!
This is what I mean when I say my work is about helping
organisations move from reactive people management to intentional leadership.
Not just fixing what's broken but building something that lasts.
Who This Is For
Over four years, I've come to recognise the clients who benefit most from this integrated approach. You may see yourself here:
If you're an HR or L&D Manager, you're probably under pressure to improve leadership capability and engagement while being pulled into operational firefighting every day. You know the managers in your business need development, but you're not always sure where to start, or how to make it stick. What you need is a trusted partner who understands both the people side and the business side. You need someone who can help you build a case, design the right interventions, and ensure the people systems support the leadership behaviours you're trying to create.
If you're a Managing Director or Business Owner, you've likely built something remarkable and the people who helped you get here are now in leadership roles they were never formally prepared for. Your HR practices may have grown organically and haphazardly, and what worked when you were a small team no longer fits the organisation you've become. You need leadership development that equips your managers to lead, and HR consulting that aligns your people practices with where the business is going.
If you're an individual manager, whether you're newly promoted and finding your footing, a middle manager feeling overstretched and underequipped, or a senior leader navigating complexity and change, you need more than advice. You need a space to think, to be challenged, and to grow into the leader you're capable of being.
In all three cases, the common thread is that leadership
capability and the people systems that support it must evolve together. That is exactly what I help with.
A Note of Gratitude
To every client who has trusted me with their growth, their people, and their organisations over these four years, thank you. This realisation didn't happen in isolation. It emerged through every coaching conversation, every consulting engagement, and every leadership development journey we've shared together.
I'm stepping into this next chapter with more clarity, more purpose, and more excitement than I've felt in a long time.
If what I've described here resonates and if something in you
recognises the gap between where your leadership is now and where it needs to
be I'd love to have a conversation. Not a sales pitch. Just a genuine exchange
of thinking about what might be possible.
You're welcome to connect with me on LinkedIn or reach out
directly. I'm always curious to hear what's most pressing in your leadership
space right now.