Deborah is a Canadian, UK-based leadership coach and culture transformation consultant, primarily serving firms within the global financial services sector.
She brings a distinctive 16-year background in bulge bracket investment banking in New York and London. In the late 1990s, recognizing the profound impact leadership and culture have on business performance — and sensing the growing need for deeper transformation in this space — she pivoted her career. Deborah retrained with leading coaching institutions worldwide and continues to expand her expertise in understanding how individual, ancestral, and collective trauma shape leadership, organizational culture, and our relationship with money, as well as the healing modalities required to restore balance.
Her mission is to elevate the consciousness and effectiveness of leaders who seek to create global impact and enduring legacies. Deborah believes in the power of meaningful purpose, aligned values, and peer-based learning cultures that enable organizations to thrive amid disruption 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 earned a Dean’s List MBA from the Ivey Business School at the University of Western Ontario. Following her studies, she worked as a Research Associate at IMD in Lausanne for two years.
She then joined Morgan Stanley in New York in Corporate Finance, later moving to London to work in Capital Markets. She subsequently gained asset management experience with Frank Russell Company and Oppenheimer (now part of CIBC). After transitioning from banking, 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 United States, Canada, Switzerland, France, Spain, Brazil, South Africa, and the UK. Passionate about languages, she is fluent in French and Spanish and has conversational Portuguese.
Her client portfolio includes organizations such as Accel, A.P. Moller – Maersk, Barclays, BNP Paribas, BP, CPPIB, JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, IBM, L’Oréal, McDonald’s, Save the Children, and 3i Group, among others.
At a time when rebuilding trust in institutions is increasingly urgent, Deborah is writing a book titled Bubble Wrapped Betrayal, exploring the impact of our imbalanced monetary systems on leaders today and the need for deeper self-awareness to build purpose-led, values-driven cultures. She demonstrates how measuring cultural values provides leaders with critical insight into organizational potential and risk, forming the foundation for meaningful dialogue and transformative change.
In her spare time, Deborah enjoys travel, skiing, sailing, tennis, hiking, entertaining, theatre, and opera. She also takes great pleasure in connecting extended family members spread across six continents.