Psychologist | Coach | Facilitator | Speaker
Why is leading together challenging?
This is the question at the heart of my work.
Organisations bring senior leaders together because the challenges that they face are too complex to be understood or led by one person alone. Each leader brings different expertise, experience and perspectives.
Putting capable people around the same table doesn't automatically mean that capability becomes collective.
My work focuses on how leadership teams make sense of complex issues together, use the expertise available to them, make good decisions, translate those decisions into coordinated action, and take collective responsibility for the organisation as a whole.
Why Collective Leadership?
Much of my work has involved coaching individual senior leaders. Over time, I've become increasingly interested in how often the challenges they bring to coaching have a collective dimension.
Competing priorities
Different views of the same situation
Too much being escalated to the CEO
Tension between functions
Decisions repeatedly revisited
Unclear ownership
These show up as individual leadership challenges, but often there is a collective dimension that needs attention.
This has increasingly led me to focus on a broader question:
What enables a group of capable individual leaders to become an effective collective?
My work brings together established research, psychological insight and what I observe in practice to explore that question.
What I bring
Dr Marie Stopforth C.Psychol.
Psychological depth
I'm a dual recognised Chartered Coaching Psychologist and Sport Psychologist, bringing a psychologically informed understanding of performance, behaviour, relationships and the dynamics that shape how senior leaders work together.
Research and evidence
I have a PhD in Group Dynamics and spent around 15 years in higher education. My work is evidence based, but I'm equally interested in where the evidence is incomplete and what we can learn from practice.
Experience with senior leaders
I work with senior leaders individually and collectively on the real challenges of organisational leadership - competing priorities, difficult relationships, complex decisions and change.
Independent challenge
I'm not there to tell a leadership team how to run its organisation. I help teams see what's happening more clearly, surface what may be getting in the way, and develop their own capacity to work through it.
Working together
I work with senior leadership teams at different stages, from understanding what's getting in the way to developing and supporting more effective collective leadership.