Coaching for Leadership
Coaches
Coaching for Leadership
Space to reflect in-depth and gain insight to
Lead with purpose
Qualified experienced coaches
NIODA coaches have undertaken postgraduate study and practical training in the Organisational Role Analysis approach to coaching. A number of coaches have an additional certification in Analytic-Network Coaching. They are graduates of the NIODA Management Leadership (Organisation Dynamics) Masters program, or equivalent, or have a doctoral degree and years of coaching experience.

Dr Brigid Nossal
Organisational Role Analysis
A-N Coaching (accredited)
Organisational Analysis (TEF)
Brigid has worked as a coach with executives and managers for over 25 years. Her expertise is in Organisational Role Analysis and, more recently, Analytic-Network Coaching. Her approach is to work with clients to create a confidential exploratory space for examining and reflecting upon work roles, organisations, and the systems that they are part of. By supporting clients to adopt an analytical and systems focus, it is possible to get to the heart of personal and organisational challenges and how these impact both the individual and the system they are working in. Bringing two enquiring minds to the work teases out hidden assumptions and delivers new insights that support constructive decision-making. The ORA fosters this reflective method and a capability for questioning and challenging habitual ways of thinking that endures long after the coaching has ended.
Brigid has worked with a broad range of organisations, mostly in the public and not-for-profit sectors. Her passion is to provide opportunities for leaders to develop the skills and experience to reflect deeply upon the kinds of organisations, systems and societies that we are all engaged in co-creating.

Ms Helen McKelvie
Organisational Role Analysis
A-N Coaching (accredited)
Organisational Analysis (TEF)
Helen has had over 25 years of working in organisations to inform her approach to helping others gain insights into how they take up roles and how to achieve greater alignment with individual, team and organisational purpose. Her own roles as internal planning consultant, policy and project manager, and lawyer in workplaces in both the public and private sectors have provided her with first-hand experience of the complexity and challenges of organisational life.
In her coaching practice Helen is passionate about nurturing each client’s leadership potential in whatever role they are in, or are aspiring to. Her areas of particular interest include: working with the challenges and benefits of cultural diversity; supporting new career directions, ‘What’s next?’; and understanding how to achieve ‘successful succession’.
Helen creates a safe, reflective space for respectful communication and connection, opening up possibility for deep learning and growth.
Helen is an alumnus and now teaches in the Master’s program at the National Institute of Organisation Dynamics Australia (NIODA). She also has a Bachelor of Laws and Bachelor of Arts from the University of Melbourne. In addition to her academic qualifications Helen is an accredited practitioner of PRISM Brain Mapping, an online, neuroscience-based behaviour mapping instrument, and is a registered A-N Coach, Certified to use the Analytic-Network Coaching System and Certified to coach and debrief the Wild Leadership Questionnaire. Helen also has training and experience in workplace mediation, and yoga teaching qualifications. She is a member of Group Relations Australia.

Dr Wendy Harding
Organisational Role Analysis
Organisational Analysis (TEF)
Dr Wendy Harding is a senior practitioner in the Australian and global organisation dynamics field. Dr Harding is the current CEO and Director of Academic Programs at NIODA, having over 30 years’ experience in teaching, consulting, coaching, supervision and research. Across these years Wendy has undertaken many coaching, supervision, consultancy and action research projects in a broad span of organisational settings from large government departments to a variety of corporate and not-for-profit organisations. Organisational consulting projects have focussed on team and whole of organisation development and structural and cultural change, using a range of intervention methods. Individual coaching and supervision have been undertaken with a culturally diverse range of people working at all levels in organisations from executive level to direct service delivery.
Wendy’s coaching/supervision/consulting philosophy is based in strong beliefs in the capacity of people to be able to make change that supports their work. The role of a coach/supervisor/consultant is then to provide opportunity for shared reflection and consideration of the experience of undertaking the work in the organisation. In coaching and supervising deep reflection enables unblocking of obstructions to think, learn and action differently about the work. In organisational consulting what is enabled is the capacity to influence structure, culture and strategic processes, to thus add value to the organisation. Wendy’s practice involves the introduction of theory, method and technologies in support of these considerations, however, at its core is always about reflection and dialogue; about people working constructively together.

Ms Jennifer Burrows
Organisational Role Analysis
Organisational Analysis (TEF)
I bring systems thinking and a socioanalytic lens to help organisations and individuals thrive in complex environments. I approach coaching through working collaboratively with the person being coached, holding the tension between leaving space for emergence and achieving the desired outcomes, using the unique situation and presenting needs as the starting point. The co-created results are relevant, immediately applicable and owned by the participants.
I have extensive experience working in the education sector leading change innovations, as well as with Boards of not-for-profit companies. I hold a Masters in Philosophy of Social Innovation (Organisational Analysis & Leadership) through the Grubb School of Organisational Analysis, as well as a Master of Business (Training & Change Management) and other qualifications in education. I am a Board member of Annecto, a not-for-profit age and disability support organisation, and a Director of Group Relations Australia.

Ms Laurette Chang-Leng
Organisational Role Analysis
A-N Coaching (accredited)
Organisational Analysis (TEF)
Laurette is a mindful leadership coach who works with current and emerging organisation leaders to develop and understand their own leadership style.
Laurette’s aim is to work with you so that you become a confident, compassionate leader who is able to work within the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous organisations.
Laurette’s experience in complex organisations is coupled with master’s in leadership and management (organisation dynamics). This marriage of both practical and theoretical knowledge provides an approach to understanding leadership in organisations.

Mr Rob Ryan
Organisational Role Analysis
A-N Coaching (accredited)
Organisational Analysis (TEF)
Rob specialises in coaching, strategic planning and evaluation, organisation and service reviews, team and leadership development and stakeholder engagement in government, business and not-for-profit sectors. He has nineteen years experience in coaching and consulting to a variety of organisations on projects involving evaluation, review and capacity building.
Rob’s approach is informed by his previous CEO, service management, workplace relations and education leadership roles. He has high level skills in designing and leading large change projects and also in working with individuals, boards, leadership teams and other work groups.
He has supported many organisations in coaching individuals, reviewing and developing governance structures and processes and has had leadership roles in many not-for-profit organisations. He is currently the Director of Administration of the International Society for the Psychoanalytic Study of Organisations and also co-convenes their Australian activities.
Coaching supports continuous holistic learning. Often today, the generic versions of ‘coaching’ (and some counselling) can involve treating work challenges as being derived primarily from individual inadequacies, and therefore the interventions focus on changing these – individuals tend to be pathologized, as if they ‘need fixing’.
Therefore, it is important to examine the client’s experience of the work system, how they ‘see’ it, ‘feel’ it, exploring overt assumptions and also exploring what may be out of their awareness, but which is influencing their experiences.
This form of holistic coaching provides insights into the whole of the experience and enables a re-integration of perspectives on what is happening and why it may be happening. This provides opportunities for development of better informed insights and more effective action than may occur solely through, for example, a purely goal-based coaching program.

Mr Thomas Mitchell
Organisational Role Analysis
Organisational Analysis (TEF)
Over the last several years Thomas has enhanced his extensive professional experience by learning from, and working with, leaders across the executive coaching, group dynamics, and systems psychodynamics fields. A graduate of the NIODA Master of Leadership and Management – Organisation Dynamics, Thomas combines a deep understanding of working in large organisations with a passion for supporting others as they work toward achieving their goals and gaining deeper awareness of their actions and drivers. Highly skilled in creating a safe environment to support participants explore their roles, Thomas manages the balance between empathy and candour allowing participants to feel secure whilst having their assumptions challenged.
Leadership coaching in-depth: get at what’s really going on
Working with a NIODA coach you’ll be taking the opportunity to look below the surface to understand what’s really going on with your leadership role.
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Emerging Leadership: cometh the moment, cometh the leader.
Popular literature and human dependence promote the idea of The Leader, someone who can be relied on to show us the way. As if The Leader is always a leader. Some individuals are able to manipulate this wish and convince others that they have some special quality which makes them a person to follow in all circumstances. However, the evidence of history is that successful leadership is always circumstantial, regardless of whether history judges the outcomes to be good or bad. Such circumstances are a combination of the social forces that originate outside the person and the unique capacities that emerge from within the person at the right time.
At this time in Australia, we have a pending referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. We have official ‘leaders’ seeking followership, The Prime Minister (Yes) and the Leader of the Opposition (No). Both the individuals occupying these roles are currently regarded as uninspiring, just playing politics, not really mobilising others to identify with the possibilities of change.
Formally they are regarded as ‘leaders’ but on this issue, they are just politicians. The historical moment, which neither of them can claim to have shaped, is searching for a person or group who/which can connect the historically determined circumstance to the lived experience of those who will decide Yes or No through their vote.
The vacuum of leadership on this issue is not surprising because neither formal ‘leader’ can point to any convincing personal appreciation of what is at stake. Nothing is emerging at the top level; it is all about fixed arguments, ‘righting historical wrongs’ versus ‘threats to the constitution that has served us so well’.
Navigating Ambiguity: The Essence of Emerging Leadership
The notion of ‘emerging leadership’ is that it is a dynamically contingent relationship between what capacity an individual or group can find within themselves and how this speaks to the challenges others experience about which path to follow. We don’t need a leader if the choice is clear; then we only need an administrator or manager who decides the way forward based on some established criterion; a way that is tried and true, efficient, technically feasible, politically correct, evidence-based etc.
The emergent leader actually embraces an ambivalent situation and can look inward to discern an aspect of their being that connects to the deliberation about possibilities; and on the basis of that reflection argues for this way rather than that way, regardless of the formal position they hold, whilst mindful of the values of those they seek to influence.
Emergent leadership can be an everyday occurrence, not necessarily one of national and historical importance.
Discovering Leadership Through Personal Experience
Some years ago, working as an organisational consultant, I was persuaded by an acquaintance to offer assistance to her sister’s small business. Having started a fashion design business from her parent’s garage, this young woman had, with the unpaid help of her husband, achieved enough sales to employ another sister with marketing expertise and then, following further business growth, was needing to hire the first employee from outside the family. She wanted help in conducting the selection process such that this critical decision would enhance her growing enterprise whilst not threatening its family values. She had never used a consultant before, was appropriately dubious about the cost, and asked me if I knew anything about small business. I replied in the negative since all my consulting had been with larger entities.
We negotiated a sliding scale contract that would limit her risk depending upon the value she determined I was providing. She was really trusting her sister’s recommendation that I would be worth the expenditure. And I was impressed by her practical common sense.
It took two meetings between the sisters and me before I emerged as a leader in this circumstance.
As I reflected on my experience with the two sisters, of what was being said and not said and how this made me feel, I suddenly could not believe that I had told the client and myself that I did not know much about small business. When my conscious mind relaxed enough, I recalled that I had actually grown up in a small business. My father and his brother had started a small business after WWII and run it for 40 years. My whole young life had been shaped by the vicissitudes of a small business but the ‘professional’, adult me had left that all behind. When I got back in touch with my early experience, including memories of all the financial precariousness that my parents had tried to shield us from, of interfamily dynamics, and the direct satisfaction that I saw my father gain from being valued by his customers, I was in a changed state of mind when talking to my small business client.
Navigating Complex Leadership Dynamics: Balancing Intuition and Expertise
I began listening and speaking from a different space. I became a quiet leader whose thoughts and suggestions were amplified by my intuitive understanding of the risks and excitements my client was trying to estimate and choose. She was a talented and ambitious designer, a start-up entrepreneur in a notoriously risky sector and she had young children. Whose needs would prevail? Could it be both/and?
When I undertook that assignment I was already a ‘senior’ in the world of leadership development but obviously still very humanly vulnerable to putting conscious ‘knowing’ ahead of ‘coming to know’ within a particular circumstance. The case revealed that my most relevant resources were in my lived experience rather than my formal knowledge. I had to ‘emerge’ as a leader in the particular circumstance so could I lead my client to articulate what she felt about bringing an outsider into her business; a business that was outgrowing the family.
My sudden remembering of a past I had ‘forgotten’ is what Freud meant by getting in touch with the unconscious. In the consultation I did not need to explore why I had repressed my early experience, it was enough to embrace the creative lead it gave me into the current circumstance. It gave me a voice that was missing up until that point. A voice that was sufficiently authentic for my client to take it seriously.
Cultivating Emerging Leadership: Unveiling Personal Experience for Future Possibilities
Leadership does not belong to a formal role; it finds a voice of its own.
So I now argue that a critical aspect of leadership development is a process of helping individuals to recover the resources that exist within their own experience. This is different from developing an administrator, manager or executive who is rightly expected to have requisite knowledge and skills for the job they are employed to do. Leadership is not a fixed position. The need for leadership emerges and it can be offered by those who have some insight into future possibilities; possibilities that can connect the known to the unknown. We cannot be trained to do that but we can be primed to do it, if we learn to reflect in an intentional way to recall, to recognise and to harvest our past experiences as a resource for the future.*
It is quite possible that neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of the Opposition have the internal resources to inspire a future for the Indigenous Voice but that does not mean such leadership will not emerge. Leadership does not belong to a formal role; it finds a voice of its own.
*My colleagues at NIODA are offering a leadership development workshop to encourage just this, ‘Embracing your personal history for impactful leadership’, Learn more here.
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Emerging Leadership: cometh the moment, cometh the leader.
Popular literature and human dependence promote the idea of The Leader, someone who can be relied on to show us the way. As if The Leader is always a leader. Some individuals are able to manipulate this wish and convince others that they have some special quality which makes them a person to follow in all circumstances. However, the evidence of history is that successful leadership is always circumstantial, regardless of whether history judges the outcomes to be good or bad. Such circumstances are a combination of the social forces that originate outside the person and the unique capacities that emerge from within the person at the right time.
At this time in Australia, we have a pending referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. We have official ‘leaders’ seeking followership, The Prime Minister (Yes) and the Leader of the Opposition (No). Both the individuals occupying these roles are currently regarded as uninspiring, just playing politics, not really mobilising others to identify with the possibilities of change.
Formally they are regarded as ‘leaders’ but on this issue, they are just politicians. The historical moment, which neither of them can claim to have shaped, is searching for a person or group who/which can connect the historically determined circumstance to the lived experience of those who will decide Yes or No through their vote.
The vacuum of leadership on this issue is not surprising because neither formal ‘leader’ can point to any convincing personal appreciation of what is at stake. Nothing is emerging at the top level; it is all about fixed arguments, ‘righting historical wrongs’ versus ‘threats to the constitution that has served us so well’.
Navigating Ambiguity: The Essence of Emerging Leadership
The notion of ‘emerging leadership’ is that it is a dynamically contingent relationship between what capacity an individual or group can find within themselves and how this speaks to the challenges others experience about which path to follow. We don’t need a leader if the choice is clear; then we only need an administrator or manager who decides the way forward based on some established criterion; a way that is tried and true, efficient, technically feasible, politically correct, evidence-based etc.
The emergent leader actually embraces an ambivalent situation and can look inward to discern an aspect of their being that connects to the deliberation about possibilities; and on the basis of that reflection argues for this way rather than that way, regardless of the formal position they hold, whilst mindful of the values of those they seek to influence.
Emergent leadership can be an everyday occurrence, not necessarily one of national and historical importance.
Discovering Leadership Through Personal Experience
Some years ago, working as an organisational consultant, I was persuaded by an acquaintance to offer assistance to her sister’s small business. Having started a fashion design business from her parent’s garage, this young woman had, with the unpaid help of her husband, achieved enough sales to employ another sister with marketing expertise and then, following further business growth, was needing to hire the first employee from outside the family. She wanted help in conducting the selection process such that this critical decision would enhance her growing enterprise whilst not threatening its family values. She had never used a consultant before, was appropriately dubious about the cost, and asked me if I knew anything about small business. I replied in the negative since all my consulting had been with larger entities.
We negotiated a sliding scale contract that would limit her risk depending upon the value she determined I was providing. She was really trusting her sister’s recommendation that I would be worth the expenditure. And I was impressed by her practical common sense.
It took two meetings between the sisters and me before I emerged as a leader in this circumstance.
As I reflected on my experience with the two sisters, of what was being said and not said and how this made me feel, I suddenly could not believe that I had told the client and myself that I did not know much about small business. When my conscious mind relaxed enough, I recalled that I had actually grown up in a small business. My father and his brother had started a small business after WWII and run it for 40 years. My whole young life had been shaped by the vicissitudes of a small business but the ‘professional’, adult me had left that all behind. When I got back in touch with my early experience, including memories of all the financial precariousness that my parents had tried to shield us from, of interfamily dynamics, and the direct satisfaction that I saw my father gain from being valued by his customers, I was in a changed state of mind when talking to my small business client.
Navigating Complex Leadership Dynamics: Balancing Intuition and Expertise
I began listening and speaking from a different space. I became a quiet leader whose thoughts and suggestions were amplified by my intuitive understanding of the risks and excitements my client was trying to estimate and choose. She was a talented and ambitious designer, a start-up entrepreneur in a notoriously risky sector and she had young children. Whose needs would prevail? Could it be both/and?
When I undertook that assignment I was already a ‘senior’ in the world of leadership development but obviously still very humanly vulnerable to putting conscious ‘knowing’ ahead of ‘coming to know’ within a particular circumstance. The case revealed that my most relevant resources were in my lived experience rather than my formal knowledge. I had to ‘emerge’ as a leader in the particular circumstance so could I lead my client to articulate what she felt about bringing an outsider into her business; a business that was outgrowing the family.
My sudden remembering of a past I had ‘forgotten’ is what Freud meant by getting in touch with the unconscious. In the consultation I did not need to explore why I had repressed my early experience, it was enough to embrace the creative lead it gave me into the current circumstance. It gave me a voice that was missing up until that point. A voice that was sufficiently authentic for my client to take it seriously.
Cultivating Emerging Leadership: Unveiling Personal Experience for Future Possibilities
Leadership does not belong to a formal role; it finds a voice of its own.
So I now argue that a critical aspect of leadership development is a process of helping individuals to recover the resources that exist within their own experience. This is different from developing an administrator, manager or executive who is rightly expected to have requisite knowledge and skills for the job they are employed to do. Leadership is not a fixed position. The need for leadership emerges and it can be offered by those who have some insight into future possibilities; possibilities that can connect the known to the unknown. We cannot be trained to do that but we can be primed to do it, if we learn to reflect in an intentional way to recall, to recognise and to harvest our past experiences as a resource for the future.*
It is quite possible that neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of the Opposition have the internal resources to inspire a future for the Indigenous Voice but that does not mean such leadership will not emerge. Leadership does not belong to a formal role; it finds a voice of its own.
*My colleagues at NIODA are offering a leadership development workshop to encourage just this, ‘Embracing your personal history for impactful leadership’. Learn more here.