Being a CEO can be isolating and insular, making it challenging to create and innovate in a “safe” environment. As a coach and advisor, I cultivate a conversation space for my clients to tap into their creativity, harness their intellect, talk through challenges, and focus on their growth and development.
I use selected processes and tools to help leaders manage their energy, relationships, and connections while leveraging systems and structures to get more done.
I value my relationships with clients. These relationships are characterized by the level of generosity and vulnerability they allow and are nurtured by trust, openness, curiosity, and the willingness to be changed by the conversation. The relationships I build with my clients open up possibilities, expand capabilities, and inspire new directions, actions, and outcomes.
Integrating the Multiple Roles of the CEO
CEOs are human beings. They occupy multiple roles in life, including spouse/life partner, parent, caregiver, citizen, and enterprise leader. Unfortunately, the reality is that these roles put values in tension with each other in ways that can be difficult to reconcile — sometimes making it hard to live with yourself.
Authentic leadership requires an honest and open reckoning with the interior conflicts and the exterior choices the CEO role demands — the brutal truths of a business facing competition (cost cutting, layoffs, etc.), dealing with the risks emerging in the macro-environment (reverse globalization, climate change, great power conflicts, energy crises, VUCA), generational changes in the employment contract (work from anywhere, support for social identity groups, social justice, and intersectionality), disruption across business and society as a consequence of emerging technologies (AI, robotics, mobility, blockchain, VR, etc.). No one understands the full complexity of these times. Some of the threats are or at least can feel, existential. How you deal with them reflects your character and tells your stakeholders who you are.
Our intentions and actions shape who we are and who we become through the relationships we cultivate over a career and a lifetime. Becoming a CEO who is a match for the challenges of these particular times calls for a shift in perspective from individual to team, from having answers to generating questions, from knowing to learning, from some of us to all of us, from transactional to transformational.
Being a leader, being a CEO is a great responsibility and a great privilege. While extending the privilege in ways that benefit your company, your stakeholders, and the greater human community may not be easy — it is worthy.
Offerings
Each engagement begins as a conversation — a space for clarity, reflection, and progress. Whether you’re seeking immediate insight, a full-day deep dive, a transformative retreat, or a longer-term development process, these offerings are designed to meet you where you are on your leadership journey and accelerate you toward greater alignment, effectiveness, and purpose.
The Executive Clarity Session
A one-hour conversation that generates action on what matters most.
Leading at the top can be lonely. The Executive Clarity Session is a dedicated hour designed to bring perspective, focus, and progress to a real challenge or opportunity you’re facing.
This is an opportunity to experience what it feels like to be deeply listened to by someone who understands the complexity, paradox, and responsibility of leadership. Through a guided intake process and a purposeful, generative conversation, you’ll explore the issue most pressing to you — whether that’s clarifying your strategy, navigating a conflict, making a decision, or reconnecting with your core purpose.
In the course of an hour, you’ll gain clarity, confidence, and momentum toward your next action.
The Executive Deep Dive
A full-day immersion to reframe challenges, realign priorities, and reignite purpose.
Big jobs rarely offer the time or space for genuine reflection. Yet, reflection is essential for leadership at this level. The Executive Deep Dive is a full-day, one-on-one engagement designed for CEOs and senior executives navigating complexity.
This experience creates the conditions for deep work: a day devoted to stepping back from the noise, examining the forces shaping your leadership, and clarifying what’s most essential. The day’s focus is customized to your needs and may center on a problem, a pattern or a persistent obstacle. Your topic might involve your Board, your team, your strategy or your life. Whatever the topic, we will dive in together to explore the ways you understand it and create new ways to deal with it. The insight that you generate during this deep dive will shift how you see the issue and set you up to take bold, decisive action.
We will use diagnostic tools, structured reflection, and open, generative dialogue, to uncover patterns that drive your decisions, surface assumptions and create new perspectives on your strategic landscape. From there we can co-design a clear plan.
You will leave with renewed clarity, a prioritized action roadmap, and an expanded understanding of how you best lead with both presence and assurance.
The Vision Retreat
A two-day guided retreat to renew perspective, reimagine possibility, and re-anchor purpose.
The Vision Retreat is a profound reset — an opportunity to pause, reflect, and reconnect with what matters most as a leader and human being. Designed for CEOs and senior executives at key inflection points such as a promotion, a new chapter, a setback, a significant decision, or a period of renewal, this experience blends reflection with strategy and design.
Over the course of two days, we together will create a confidential and generative space for inquiry: exploring your deepest motivations, your leadership narrative, and the future you want to create — for yourself, your enterprise, and the people you serve. Through guided exercises, dialogue, and synthesis, the retreat helps you surface the vision that aligns deeply with your values and your aspirations.
You’ll leave with restored energy, clear direction, and a renewed sense of coherence in your work and your life.
Ongoing Coaching & Advising
A sustained partnership for leaders committed to growth, clarity, and meaningful impact.
To lead means to learn and grow. The most powerful leadership transformation happens over time, through consistent reflection, honest dialogue, and intentional action. Some of the greatest leaps in leadership capability come after the significant breakdowns. Ongoing Coaching & Advising is a personalized engagement designed to support CEOs and senior executives as they navigate the evolving demands of leadership and life.
This partnership combines regular coaching conversations with flexible advisory support. Together, we will weave the strategic and the human dimensions of your leadership experiences — as a business, region, functional head, or CEO — into a strong, flexible and resilient leadership approach. Clients who work with me in this way, often for years, experience not only measurable results, greater effectiveness, alignment, and clarity, but also a profound sense of coherence and authenticity in the way they lead.
The cadence and format are tailored to your needs and pace: regular sessions, on-call access for critical moments, and periodic check-ins to track progress and sustain momentum.
Testimonials
“Charles has a set of techniques that helped me learn things about myself that I know I never would have discovered on my own.”
“The toolbox Charles has given me is invaluable; I find myself tapping into it day in and day out.”
“It is always fun and interesting to work with Charles. You can feel how much he cares about his clients and our success.”
“I’ve worked with Charles in many different capacities for over 10 years, and he has been one of the most influential characters in my life and my career. He has an uncanny capability to quickly understand complex environments and provide deep insight into how one can better function in those environments.”
“In my work I value the insights and advice of only a few outside advisors. I look for the rare combination of a strong conceptual grounding and mastery of relevant frameworks for understanding and intervening in whole systems, coupled with a practical grounding in the reality of doing business in the corporate environment. Charles possesses each of these in great measure, and brings a third set of gifts, namely a strong personal presence, an ability to create rapport with leaders in the organization, and the ability to coach others in order to bring out their highest aspiration and potential. This combination of these three dimensions is what sets Charles apart.”
“Charles is a mind-blowingly great coach who works from deep empathy and his commitment to a healthy and equitable society. I’ve worked with probably 6 good to great coaches over time and Charles is in a whole other league.”
“After each conversation with Charles, I feel lighter and clearer about the path forward. An amazing listener, Charles has a knack for asking questions that enable me to get to the root cause of a challenge. In addition, he creates a space of psychological safety. I am able to be vulnerable with Charles. With him, I know there will be no judgment. Instead, he offers a tremendous amount of care and empathy, deep knowledge and understanding of human behaviors, and meaningful insights. Charles is simply a wonderful human. I am genuinely grateful to know and have the privilege to work with him.”
“Charles has played an integral role in my leadership journey from a Global Finance Integration Lead to Senior Vice President and CFO at Del Monte to Executive Vice President and CFO at Perrigo. Throughout this journey, Charles has challenged me to think more strategically, to broaden my perspective to consider multiple stakeholders’ views, to invest my time wisely (balancing work and personal life), and to be clear about my intentions and purpose. It is a pleasure to work with Charles.”
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