Steven’s role as coach is as a thinking partner – to help his coaching clients make sense and meaning of their subjective experiences more objectively.
He guides executives, leader-managers, and self-leaders at all levels within an organisation to bridge their transactional and transformative goals, to intentionally walk their walk by role-modelling their values, to become inspirational, impactful and authentic leaders.
Areas of Specialisation
• Leader-as-Coach Development: [‘Think like a Coach’] – Enhancing leaders’ capacity for self- and social-awareness and reflective insight, contextual intelligence, emotional adaptability and intentionality – to model their values and to use their authentic voice.
• Mindset Coaching: Applying the transformative power of a metacognitive mindset – recognising and transforming habitual thoughts, assumptions, blind spots and biases.
• Personality Development & Vertical Integration: Helping leaders to recognise core motivations, triggers, and defence patterns.
• Role-Transition Resilience: Empowering leaders to embrace their new role-identities, navigating their career transitions and advancements.
With a career that bridges the creative arts and behavioural sciences, his coaching approach combines insight with evidence-based techniques. He brings over 20 years of experience as an organisational development consultant, leadership coach, practitioner-researcher, author, international conference speaker and masterclass facilitator.
He is the author of a chapter on Coaching for Authentic Leadership in a peer-reviewed coaching psychology publication. He has frequently presented and spoken at local and international industrial-organisational and coaching psychology conferences.
His coaching experience encompasses executive and leadership coaching, coaching programme research, design and development, leader-as-coach training, project management and coach supervision for large coaching projects.
His experience, together with evidence-based research, highlight a distinct correlation between emotional intelligence competence and authentic, intentional leadership. This underpins much of his approach to coaching, which aims to bridge and integrate Performance (doing/transactional) and Developmental (being/transformational) coaching goals.
Coaching Philosophy
Steven believes that we all play, or may be called on to play, a leadership role – even if it is self-leadership. And research shows that being authentic and resonant in this Leadership Role has the most effective and empowering impact.
He views a coaching approach as an ideal method to drive and facilitate both change and learning – encouraging leader-managers to build psychologically safe and trust-based relationships, and guiding them toward an intentional leadership style.
He believes that every leader-manager has the potential to embody the role of “Leader-as-Coach” (to think like a coach) – by adopting the spirit, mindset, skills and capacities required of an authentic leader. The aim is not intended to train leaders as professional coaches, but rather to align their leadership style with core emotional intelligence and coaching principles – demonstrating alignment and congruence in both actions and intent.
Coaching Approach
Steven’s overarching coaching approach draws on a combination of modalities to suit each client’s unique context. His coaching sessions provide a psychologically safe environment, being attuned to and guided by the coachee’s particular objectives and what they present in-session.
His coaching is primarily grounded in metacognitive, systems, and context-based approaches. This can assist the coachee in a number of ways:
1) To map their own mindsets – to recognise and master their own thought processes and intentions.
2) To make sense, find meaning, and to deepen resonance – in order to build insight and wisdom.
3) To ideally embody and implement the leader’s role as being responsible for containing (holding/supporting) how their department connects to the organisation’s greater context.
His approach provides an eclectic and cohesive set of coaching approaches and modalities – adapted to the client’s unique requirements and coaching objectives:
• Neuroscience: Co-regulating of the coachee-coach nervous systems, to ensure and manage a psychological safe coaching space.
• Cognitive-Behavioural and Values-Based Coaching: For example, Acceptance & Commitment Coaching – emphasising psychological flexibility and applying metacognition using the observing-self – helps us map and see our mindset and make sense of our experiences.
• Humanistic/Person-Centred Coaching Modalities: Dialogic, Solutions-Focused, Positive Psychology and Strength-based coaching, and Self-Determination Theory – focusing on intrinsic motivation, psychological needs, and wellbeing.
• Systems and Depth Coaching: Incorporating Systems Psychodynamics (Group Relations), Gestalt, and Phenomenological coaching – observing the subjective/lived-experience, and emergent patterns and resonances.
• Ontological & Embodied Coaching: Integrating all levels – Our Identity (the Role we play – who we’re being, in context), the language we use, our emotions, and physical/somatic sensations we experience in our Role.
• Ego/Cognitive Development levels: Distinguishing, balancing and integrating Performance (lower-order) goals and capabilities; and, Developmental (higher order) goals and capacities – to understand the distinction and growth differential between conventional and post-conventional Action Logics – to become a rounded and grounded authentic Leader.
• Personality Dynamics: Using the Enneagram and Jungian Cognitive Functions/MBTI – valuable tools to gain insight into and work with our personality, ego defences, and core motivations.
Steven’s coaching aims to provide a journey of personal growth, deepened understanding and insights – designed to equip leaders to achieve sustainable change through meaningful, intentional, and authentic engagement with their colleagues and clients.
Steven began his corporate career as an HR and Organisational Development (OD) consultant, leadership development facilitator, and trainer with one of the Big-Four firms, eventually establishing his own consulting and coaching practice.
He has held various leadership roles within industrial-organisational and coaching psychology associations, including serving as Chair of SIOPSA’s Interest Group of Coaching & Consulting Psychology and as its representative on the ISCP International Executive Committee.
With extensive experience working across sectors and cultures, he has partnered with both local and international corporations in industries including education, transportation, banking, insurance, consulting, mining, multinational manufacturing, engineering, healthcare, HR, academia, energy, compliance, entertainment, media, technology, and public sector entities such as government departments, parastatals, and municipalities.
His clients range from private individuals to high-level leaders, including CEOs, executive managers, and their teams. Steven is also committed to supporting the next generation of professionals as a pro bono mentor-coach for HR and Psychology students.
Some coaching-project roles
– Coaching-project design and development, lead coach, and coach supervisor – for an executive coaching program at a provincial government public-entity agency.
– Coach and developer of a coaching project-management online platform – designed for the senior leadership across multiple provincial and municipal entities.
– Coach for consultancy coach panels and private clients.
Steven’s clients say…
“Steven possesses an exceptional ability to understand the team dynamics and through his Authentic-intention Model refocused the team towards conversations that enable a genuine focus on what the real issues were, thus creating a safer environment for engagement. In addition, he has a keen ability to enable personal transformation that leads individual managers to understand and eliminate barriers to more effective performance. He is an extremely good listener and an authentic and professional coach.” ~ Group Executive
“Steven is an amazing coach, he knows how to quickly and efficiently get to the heart of the matter. I have really enjoyed his coaching style as well as his insights. He is the real deal, I have seen a tangible difference in my beliefs and attitudes thanks to him.” ~ Senior Manager
“I have been coached before, but this coaching was by far the most detailed and challenging. I thoroughly enjoyed every session, and it assisted me in my day-to-day thinking and decision making. It had meaning and made a huge difference to the way I acted, listened and my reaction. What is most probably the best thing about the experience is that my team can notice a remarkable change. And it’s having a positive change.” ~ Divisional Manager
