Leadership Development Consulting

Barbara specialises in working with executives – helping them to strengthen both their cognitive capacity as well as their emotional regulating system, thus enabling them to learn ways to sustain their physical, mental and emotional energy leading to high levels of performance and productivity.

Her career spans 35 years – and during this time, her business experience has been gained both domestically as well as internationally. In her most recent corporate executive role, Barbara headed up the executive coaching business for an international consulting firm across the Asia Pacific region. She was also a member of the global executive group accountable for managing the quality of delivery of coaching worldwide.

In these positions, Barbara was responsible for developing the expertise of a cadre of coaches across a number of cultures in the region, including India, Greater China and Korea. She also personally delivered coaching to senior level executives throughout these regions – and continues to do so.

Of particular interest to her is risk mitigation and leadership style, and her work with senior leaders often makes a significant contribution to this critical aspect of business operation where the organisation may be at genuine material risk.

Service contribution to the not-for-profit sector forms part of Executive Mandala’s overall strategy, and Barbara and her team currently provide coaching support to executives in one such organisation. She was appointed to the Board of Directors of Disability Services Australia early in 2014, and enjoys being part of the sector at this very important period of political and social change with the implementation of the NDIS.

She is a member of the teaching faculty of PDP (Professional Development People), and teaches mindfulness technique to clinicians in the psychology arena.

She is currently completing her doctorate in philosophy, the key focus of which is looking at the effects of stress and complexity on executive ranks in corporations.  Reviewing the provision of a fully integrated approach for dealing effectively with these pressures has formed part of specific elements of her research schedule.

She is a registered Psychotherapist and is a member of the Australian Association of Buddhist Counsellors and Psychotherapists, as well as holding membership of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD).

Barbara has worked with companies such as American Express, AT & T, BHP Billiton, Bupa Australia, Campbell Arnotts, Centennial Coal, Cisco Systems, Citibank, Downer EDI, Dyno Nobel, First Data International, Foxtel, KPMG, O’Brien Glass, Telstra, Pacific Islands Club, Schering Plough, SMEC, Sun Microsystems, Taj Hotels, Resorts and Palaces Worldwide, UGL.

He has served as European Product Specialist for two of the now defunct Candle Corporation’s major products servicing customers in UK and across Western and Northern Europe. He has been technical lead on major mainframe and storage sales initiatives into a major British bank for Hitachi Data Systems in the late 1980s and has played significant roles at the interface of technology and business within major telecom and IT service providers since migrating to Australia in 1990.

In that time, Simon has participated in many change projects, both intentional and circumstantial, most notably the expansion of a small company from fewer than twenty staff to over one hundred in two years and several major outsourcing initiatives as both outsource services provider and member of the outsourced IT organisation, in management and as a technical specialist. The difficulties and partial success of these initiatives, and many others, have driven his interest in the factors supporting and inhibiting effective change within business organisations.

His interest in the wider field of human change and development has led him on a participative exploration of psychological and spiritual change models and techniques since the early 1970s, and of business change models since the late 1990s.

This interest is reflected in his forty-two year Zen meditation practice combined with martial arts and has culminated in his completion of a Bachelor degree in Counselling and Human Change at Jansen Newman Institute in Sydney in 2009. In the mid 1990s he was certified as an NLP Practitioner by McClendon Associates and is now certified by The Leadership Circle to administer and interpret their Individual and Cultural Surveys and by RocheMartin to administer and interpret their Emotional Capital Report (ECR, ECR360 and ECR Selection Report). He is also certified in Developmental Assessment by Otto Laske, PhD’s Interdevelopmental Institute. He is currently in his final year of a MSc Medicine (Psychotherapy) at the University of Sydney.

He is dedicating the senior years of his life to the facilitation of congruent and authentic developmental change in individuals and in the organisations which are so central to our lives. He takes it as obvious that the changes needed at this point in human history not only include new ways of thinking but, and particularly in organisations, new ways of choosing how we behave towards each other.

Simon has worked in and with such organisations as Fidelity Bank of Philadelphia Pa., T. Wall and Sons (UK) Ltd, Readers Digest (UK), Triad Computing Systems Ltd. (UK), Donovan Data Systems (UK) Ltd, Candle Corporation, First Data International, Hitachi Data Systems, Telstra and IBM.