What is executive coaching?

In a mission-driven organization, leadership is the essential factor that determines success or failure. Every day, leaders are called upon to make decisions that can have a ripple effect on teams and individuals as well as throughout the organization itself. But even the best leaders struggle to get their footing in their first years, and even the most experienced leaders face crises that they are ill-equipped to overcome. These struggles eat time, both from your career arc and the narrowing window that your organization has to meet its mission.

Just as a sports coach is essential to helping athletes win championships or break records, an executive coach helps leaders attain new heights that they couldn’t reach by themselves. Without themselves stepping on the field, so to speak, your executive coach remains close by developing skills and providing knowledge and insight for the leader to use at regular intervals. A coach walks the path of a leader’s journey with them, close by, but never in front. Unlike a consultant, a coach is not hired to identify problems, present solutions, or solve a leader’s problems. Neither is the coach like a therapist, who diagnoses and treats a patient. Instead, an executive coach’s job is to create a safe container where the leader can examine, identify, learn, and grow. Coaching is an environment to ask thought-provoking questions, to hold up a mirror to patterns, stories, and behaviors that may or may not serve the client’s overall goals.

What is our coaching Philosophy?

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Executive coaching is invaluable. It will accelerate the time it takes you to be your best version of a leader, and help you create the conditions for your success right now.

What your executive coach do?

Your executive coach serves as a mirror, sounding board, and personal strategist, helping you tease out the important questions you need to ask yourself and working with you to find the right answers.

  • Where in your life could you improve your performance?
  • What opportunities might you be missing?
  • Are there skills or habits getting in the way of you being a better leader?
  • What’s the best skill you have that you’re not making good use of?
  • Are you not seeing key talent on your team that could help reach the objective?
  • How are you empowering your staff to be their best selves?

Your executive coach will help you explore all of this.

Who is executive coaching for?

It’s for any leader who wants to succeed—from the ambitious go-getter early in their career who just got a promotion to the proven performer trying to translate success in one field to another to the seasoned leader who wants to move from markers of success to mastery.

On Enneagram Coaching
As Brigid’s executive coaching work with me deepens, she’s been able to bring more of her expertise with the Enneagram system into our conversations, delivering useful insights that have radically boosted my effectiveness as a manager and as an advocate for my organization’s mission.

The Enneagram framework had long been helpful to me as a tool for understanding, but Brigid’s mastery of applying it to everyday work challenges has been a true breakthrough.
Drew JonesExecutive Director and Co-Founder, Climate Interactive
On Transition Coaching
I'm incredibly thankful for the insightful and adept coaching offered by Brigid McCormack. I began working with Brigid because I was unhappy with my current employment and knew that I was undervalued on that team. Brigid helped me recognize my strengths, realize my true career goals and helped me prepare for new career opportunities. As a result, I was able to move to a new job with a better team, better salary and now feel truly appreciated. I could not have done this without Brigid's thoughtful support and work to help me realize my true potential.
Chief Legal OfficerSocial Sector
On Leadership Coaching
Brigid has been a phenomenal coach. When I started my work with Brigid, I didn’t even know I needed a leadership coach. Now I don’t think I could get by without her support.

Brigid helped me cultivate a leadership vision that I’m now living – becoming an effective, high-impact, and trusted leader in the process.

I’ve gone from a place where I struggled to let go of things, grappled with procrastination, and was constantly forgetting myself to a place where I feel comfortable and confident as a leader. Brigid gives me the space to step back and see the big picture, pulling me out of the day-to-day details and helping me understand how I can constantly improve as a leader and team member.
Alex DoukasDirector, Polluters Pays Project
"Brigid helped me gain clarity on the many ideas swirling around in my head and we shaped a plan of action that would help measure my growth acknowledging possible obstacles and available resources to support successful outcomes."
Alexis BonavitacolaArtist and E-Course Designer
"Brigid has been an invaluable resource as I tackled a new job and the challenges of running an organization during a pandemic. She has been a thought partner and sounding board. She has helped me to reframe some of my management approaches and helped broaden my view into a new industry."
Deb Salls, Executive Director,Social Venture Partners, Minnesota
I came to Brigid with a concern for the environment, but no clear sense of where to start or how to achieve my goals. Brigid helped me to expand my knowledge base through her extensive expertise in climate change. She worked with me to put together a plan and move to action. She helped me assess my priorities and reviewed my skills to identify opportunities to get started. Along the way I learned a lot! Most of all, I appreciate Brigid's way of guiding me through a complex subject. I couldn't have done it without her!
Julie Schiller MakanyTechnologist and UX Lead, Google
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Our coaching Philosophy

Our philosophy on coaching is guided by some core beliefs:

  1. Everyone has the capacity to be a great leader.
  2. Everyone needs help along the road of their leadership journey.
  3. Intentional leaders, brave leaders, and great leaders all share one thing in common: they understand themselves, their strengths, their weaknesses, their default patterns, their triggers, their blind spots.
  4. Leadership is a practice.

Do you want to succeed as a leader?

Start your journey today
Get in touch

Ready to start your executive coaching journey?

Get in touch

Brigid McCormack

Brigid McCormack is an evangelist for exceptional leadership. Brigid believes leadership is a skill that can be developed, cultivated, and honed over time. For the past 24 years, Brigid has worked inside mission driven organizations. As an executive and leader, her passion has been to identify and develop strong leaders, create inclusive cultures and enable employees to not just have meaningful careers but also to flourish. Brigid now works as an executive coach with leaders on an individual basis to accelerate or enhance their leadership skills.

Her journey began with a love of the natural world. At a young age, her father took her birding in California’s Sierra mountains, and Brigid quickly learned the names and sounds of all her favorites: the pileated woodpecker, the cedar waxwing, and the red-winged blackbird. Serving in the Peace Corps, she confronted the polluted legacy of a century of an extractive economy in Ukraine.

After eight years as a major gifts fundraiser—first at the Wharton School at the University of California and then at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business—her passion for protecting nature drew her to senior leadership roles at ClimateWorks and Audubon California. She has spent the last five years advising high net-worth clients entering the climate philanthropy space.

The drive for coaching

Herself the beneficiary of terrific mentors and executive coaches over the course of her career, Brigid always placed a premium on building the leadership skills of the team around her—from the early career managers to seasoned directors to C-suite. Among her proudest accomplishments is empowering some of California’s rising conservation leaders.

While her passion for the natural world has never waned, Brigid has shifted her focus to working closely with the leaders who will propel mission-driven organizations to success.

Qualified and inspired

In addition to her own executive experience, Brigid is Hudson Institute trained executive coach, a Dare to Lead trained facilitator, and a Tara Mohr Playing Big Facilitator. She has a BA in History and BS in Biology from Santa Clara University and a MS in Environmental Management from University of San Francisco.

Brigid still takes time to get outside and listen to the birds of Northern California, while hiking, running, or backpacking with her family. The peaceful moments are important, fuel for her work with the people and organizations working hard to stop the climate crisis and conserve natural places.