Deborah is a Canadian, UK-based leadership coach and culture transformation consultant, primarily serving firms in the global financial services sector.
Deborah has a unique 16-year background in bulge-bracket investment banking in New York and London. She changed her career path in the late 1990s, recognizing the impact leadership and culture have on business results, and guided by her intuitive sense that demand for services in this area would grow. She retrained with top coaching schools around the world and continues to deepen her understanding of how individual, ancestral, and collective trauma impact leadership, corporate cultures, and our relationship with money, as well as the most effective modalities to heal and rebalance.
Her mission is to help raise the consciousness and effectiveness of leaders with global impact and lasting legacies. Deborah believes in the benefits of engaging employees through meaningful purpose, aligned values, and a mutually supportive peer-learning culture capable of withstanding global disruptions in today’s VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous) world.
Deborah holds a BA in French and Spanish from Dalhousie University, including a year at the University of Geneva, and a Dean’s List MBA from the Ivey School at the University of Western Ontario. Following her studies, she worked as a Research Associate with IMD in Lausanne, Switzerland, for two years. She then joined Morgan Stanley in New York in corporate finance, later moving to London and transitioning to the capital markets side of the business. She gained experience in asset management working with Frank Russell and later Oppenheimer (now CIBC). When she changed careers, she joined Senn Delaney Leadership Consulting Group before founding the Centre for Inspired Leadership in 2001.
Deborah is an accredited transformation facilitator for McKinsey & Company. She has lived, studied, or worked in the US, Canada, Switzerland, France, Spain, Brazil, South Africa, and the UK. She is fluent in French and Spanish and has basic Portuguese skills. Sample clients include Accel, AP Moeller Maersk, Barclays, Bayer Diagnostics, BNP Paribas, BP, CPPIB, Federated Hermes, Helios, JP Morgan, Citibank, ESM, EIB, IBM, Lehman Brothers, Lloyds TSB, Lyst, McDonald’s, L’Oréal, Old Mutual, QBE, SABMiller, Save the Children International, and 3i.
At a time when there is an urgent need to bring trust back into institutions, Deborah is writing a book, Bubble-Wrapped Betrayal, which highlights the impact of our unbalanced money system on today’s leaders and emphasizes the need for greater self-awareness to maintain a steady compass while building purpose-led, values-driven cultures. She shows how measuring cultural values can provide invaluable insights for leaders—understanding the potential and risks within the current cultural environment. These measurements form the basis for deep dialogue with client leaders, uncovering opportunities, collective wisdom, and the greatest levers for change. Deborah is passionate about helping organizations manifest these changes.
In her spare time, Deborah enjoys travel, skiing, sailing, tennis, hiking, entertaining, theatre, and opera. She also enjoys connecting cousins across an extended family spread over six continents.
