Our Program

Five steps to your best leader

Every leader brings unique qualities to their role. At Spindrift Advisors, we start each program where the client is. We identify our clients’ particular values, strengths, abilities, identities, and roles and open the doorway for each client to leverage their own qualities for intentional leadership. We help you become your best version of a leader.

Step One: Understand who you are

The first step in an intentional leader is to ground your leadership in who you are. We start by asking each client to identify and examine their top values. We use the Enneagram Assessment as one of our tools to help leaders better understand themselves, their worldview, deeper motivations, and emotional patterns. Understanding how you think, how you respond to different types of people, and how you instinctively solve problems is a step in your leadership coaching journey.

Step Two: Bring your whole person into coaching

Your professional leadership is a part—perhaps a significant part—of your larger life. Your family, your goals, and your plans for the future all play a part in how you conduct yourself professionally. SpinDrift Advisors grounds every client in all their core identities: a leader, a community member, a family member, a life partner and who is their own person. Coaching work, goals, and development all stem from these identities.

Step Three: When leaders are at their best and when they are not

Key to understanding your leadership is identifying where you’re strong, what you do best, and what abilities you can always rely upon. Likewise, it’s vital to understand your weaknesses, your gaps, your triggers, and your blind spots. SpinDrift works with each leader to identify, refresh and refine both their super powers and their own personal kryptonite. Their leadership journey will involve recognizing where and when they are at their best and working with others and developing new skills to help compensate for when they are not.

Step Four: Behavior shift

Leadership is largely a collection of actions and behaviors based on each individual’s lived and learned experiences. Some of these move you toward success, and some of them don’t. At this stage, we’ll take what we’ve learned above and develop a plan to practice behaviors that work toward your goals. We develop tiny experiments, shifts, goals and metrics to help with shifts.

Step Five: Implementation

As you put this plan into action, Spindrift Advisors will be there with you, offering guidance, skills, new sources of information and perspectives to help you navigate your leadership journey. If necessary, we can extend our involvement to your executive team, to support you in your shifts and share, set expectations and make culture changes with your executive team, your staff, and your organization.

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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.