About

I was at Atlassian for 10 years doing everything from hands on new product design to forming and running globally distributed design teams.

I’ve lead the development of whole-team collaboration practices, trained cross-functional teams on how to be effective and coached dozens of leaders on how to be effective at scale, develop a healthy culture and make strategic impact.

I run leadership coaching and team coaching and training.

Reach out if you'd like to talk.

Values

Values express our intentions and orient the energy we put out into the world. They connect our contribution with meaning and narrative. When I started Guide + Mentor I wrote down the following company values as a map for this business to cultivate the kind of environment that anchors on joy.

Start with stillness

It can be tempting to see lots of action as the way forward, to the next goal, metric or moment of rest. Yet in endless striving we can quickly find that very little of our work meaningfully contributes to the outcomes we seek. When we pause to consider what’s truly important in a given situation, rather than jumping straight into the doing, so many tasks can reveal themselves to be distraction.

We start with stillness and then act with impact.

Honour your worth

As a human we are each worthy of being here, of being seen and heard and acknowledged - not because of what we do, but because we exist. We need everyone to show up, valuing themselves and valuing each other. Great work in the world is accomplished by teams of people who live authentically. And there’s room for all of us.

We are worthy of our being and of our contribution.

Cultivate trust

We are relational beings. Established trust opens more opportunity than any amount of ‘correctness’ or tabular data. Genuinely engaging with someone to understand what they care about paves the way for collaboration and reciprocity. The wellbeing and performance benefits found in a culture of psychological safety arise because trust is given room to expand. I know you are listening to me because I am listening to you.

We build influence through bridges of understanding, collaboration and care.

Intentionally learn

We are our own curator. If we don’t exercise that power we can find ourselves absorbing very little of our own choosing. Intentionally deciding to learn - to acknowledge that there are things we don’t yet understand or know how to do, and that we can improve with focused practice - is a principle differentiator in the impact we make. It activates humility, ability and agency. And these are powerful indeed.

We deliberately learn from experience and consciously invest in our growth.

Keep things as simple as possible

In both business and life it can be seductive to just add more - more information, more meetings, more processes, more tools. Lasting improvement, however, is found in the work of making things simpler, of taking away the noise until only the essential remains.

We find the essential and make space for it to remain in focus.