Who I am
My fascination for the development of individuals, teams and organizations has existed for a long time, starting when I studied Organizational Psychology on the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands. Besides learning through my work experiences, my personal life has given me good opportunities to learn and develop myself. After finishing my studies, I moved to Southern Africa where, together with my partner, I built up our own successful Travel company. We lived and worked there for 8 years together with our 3 children. It was an exciting time with many new changes and developments, and a time of experiencing the borders of life.
Selling our company was the catalyst to start my work with the corporate world in the Netherlands. As internal advisor and as external consultant I have built up my experience in a variety of roles: managing director of Post Academic Education, senior HR manager at ABN AMRO, trainer at de Baak, and as independent coach and facilitator. From my experience I have taken some key learnings for the workplace: look for opportunities and use them, combine logical rationality with emotions, and take responsibility for your own choices.
Entrepreneurship, creativity, courage and personal connection characterize my signature presence as a human being and as a professional.
What I do
The world around us is changing and evolving rapidly. The complexity is increasing at a pace you cannot believe. The world, the collective, is under heavy pressure from all the different and conflicting interests. Personal interests of individual leaders and the interests of multinationals shape our future.
This all leads to huge dilemmas of trust and potentially controversial choices for us all. We live and work in a tremendous complex and vulnerable world that seems to move on faster and faster every day.
Leadership, issues of organizational change, how to be effective and increase impact, these are all topics, which often correlate with each other. It is not easy to find the right directions towards decision-making, strategy choices that will represent all the dreams, wishes and answers of the various parties. This means we need to work together, to co-create interventions that provide the right fit in the specific context. Examples of effective interventions are: collective learning events, Leadership programs, coaching, (in-house), and workshops for intact or mixed teams.
Decelerating, decompressing and reflecting are key aspects of this work, and enable you to accelerate your processes
With whom I work
I am closely working together with a few international networks and colleagues. We involve each other based on the specific question of the client, the expertise and experience of our colleagues. We form strong international teams to work with the question client. The context and the markets/clients are our starting points.
We will inventory what is working well, and where you are looking for improvement.
I bring an independent perspective, from which I will be able to look, outside the box, in our search for a variety of directions or solutions to your challenge.
For development and learning you do need to have courage. To reach out, to (relatively) unknown areas of yourself, where it might feel insecure, where you do not know things for sure. Courage to continue, even though others or circumstances will not help you immediately: to move into different paths. The journey is often of more interest than arriving at the end, your goal. Often that goal has already changed, or the context, or market, has changed in the meantime. You need knowledge, experience and courage to get things moving. This is needed for a person, a team and for the organization as a whole. Honest conversations, with an eye for the relationship are key.
