Grow the Leader in you

Mary Beth believes that life is an adventure, and with that comes unknowns, risk taking, great success and failure. She provides support for leaders and their teams to see and grow their bigger selves by becoming more self-aware and more comfortable with uncertainty and risk, by cultivating vulnerability, resilience, and reflection as companions along the journey. Mary Beth’s fierce compassion for leaders combined with her background as a global corporate executive makes her uniquely skilful as a coach, trusted advisor and consultant for complex change.
Mary Beth draws on her experience and learning 20+ years of progressive international leadership at Colgate Palmolive. She has lived and worked in the U.S., Americas, Europe, Asia and Pacific and understands the complex dynamics of leading an organisation on the ground as Managing Director and also leading from the centre as Vice President Global External Innovation, which included accelerating the company’s Innovation Capabilities. She served as Chair of Colgate’s Global Innovation Fund.
Over the past five years she was worked with a broad range of client organisations around the world in consumer products, tech, banking, healthcare and communications to co-design and partner with executives and teams in executive coaching and development. Her pro bono work includes WWF, and coaching social entrepreneurs through the Coaching Fellowship at Mozilla.
Mary Beth holds a BS in Spanish from Georgetown University, an MBA from Thunderbird School of Global Management, and a Masters in Organisation Development from American University. Her extensive coach training includes The Coaches Training Institute (CTI), organisational relationship systems coaching with CRR Global, and developmental coaching as a Growth Edge Coach with Cultivating Leadership. She is certified in several instruments including Birkman, The Leadership Circle, Immunity to Change, Polarity Management, and the Global Leadership Profile (GLP). Mary Beth is a certified Dare to Lead™ facilitator with the education group of Dr. Brené Brown and a Designing Your Life Certified Coach. She is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coach Federation.
Wellington, New Zealand is home and a great launch pad to the world.

Geoff believes that leadership is both learned and co-created, and that the conditions necessary for leadership to emerge can be actively cultivated. He feels that in our increasingly complex world, the leadership patterns and behaviors that brought success today will need to evolve to meet tomorrow’s challenges. Using experiential and action learning techniques, Geoff helps leaders develop the self-awareness and interpersonal skills necessary for leading high performance teams, those with the capacity to grow and thrive while operating under conditions of complexity, risk, and uncertainty.
Geoff is deeply committed to helping others increase their capacity to, and readiness for, leading others by helping them to become agile learners. He has over 15 years of experience helping individuals and organizations identify and re-frame issues that can derail effective team performance. He specializes in designing and delivering innovative developmental learning experiences and has had the opportunity to work with leaders in a variety of venues ranging from boardrooms to snowy mountaintops. Geoff has provided coaching, facilitation, and developmental programs to global leaders serving in a wide spectrum of public and private organizations. His extensive work in both the tertiary education and adventure education sectors provides the applied and theoretical foundation for his approach to learning and leadership development.
Geoff has a MS from the University of Idaho and a BA from Humboldt State University. Geoff’s Ph.D. research investigated how business accelerators influence entrepreneurial learning and development in startups. Geoff holds a range of instructional certifications and qualifications including the Leadership Circle Profile and he is trained in Growth Edge coaching.
A few years ago, with his daughter’s first word not being mum or dad but rather, ‘bye’, Geoff realized that his own world had become too complex and that he needed to recalibrate his priorities. Together with his wife and daughter they took a huge leap of faith, gave away all of their belongings, and moved from North America to Wellington, New Zealand to embrace a simpler lifestyle – one that prioritizes family, friends, and adventures.

Anna is fascinated by the ways in which individuals and the wider systems they inhabit influence and shape each other, whether groups, organisations, communities or societies. The potential for developmental growth of individuals and organisations to enable humanity, at its best, to flourish, motivates her work.

Her more than 20 years’ experience in developing leadership began with designing, creating and facilitating high impact ‘whole person’ experiences for personal and leadership learning and growth. Since then Anna has provided group leadership development programs and served as executive coach and consultant to strategic leaders across public, private and not-for-profit sectors in the UK, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Anna helps organisations function in ways that more closely support their purpose. She helps leaders grow their ability to engage more consciously and effectively with the complexity of their organisation and its context by growing new patterns of sense-making and response. She draws on theory from the fields of adult development, complex systems, positive psychology, leadership, coaching psychology, and organisational and individual change and development.

Anna has recently provided individual and collective leadership development for some of New Zealand’s largest companies as well as organisations in the education, aid & development and health sectors, including the two largest Health Boards, and several projects supporting community leadership and resilience. She enjoys the richness of collaborating with others to create synergies that can positively shift the nature of society. Anna is recognised for her ability to connect and integrate ideas from different fields of thought, challenge and provoke fresh thinking and perspectives, communicate concepts in ways that generate transformational and practical change, and create environments that support people to courageously embrace growth and change.

Anna holds an MEd (Hons) degree focused on leadership and coaching, postgraduate qualifications in management and counselling, a BSc (Jt Hons), and is an accredited consultant for the Leadership Circle Profile and several other psychometric tools.

At home in Christchurch, New Zealand, she contributes to the governance of several communities and organisations focused on well-being, growth and mental health. In her free time, she loves being a moving part of the natural environment – on foot or two wheels, in or on the water, up a mountain, or sliding down one.

Leanne stands for a future where it is normal for work environments to be places where human beings thrive, enabling organisations to succeed whilst at the same time, building social capital through how those humans are able to show up with their families and communities.

She is the co-author of Human Work: Five Leadership Mindsets for Humanising workplaces and author of the book A New Generation of Business Leaders and has spent 15 years advising organisations predominantly in the private sector (across most sectors including banking, primary sector, FMCG, tech, pharmaceuticals) as well as the public and not for profit sectors in sustainability strategy and leadership.

Her work as an Associate of Cultivating Leadership focuses on leading immersive, transformational experiences (leadership programmes, strategic facilitation, consulting, executive coaching). She has a passion for integrating the cognitive with the non-cognitive and will often infuse her work with embodied practices.

Leanne holds a Bachelor of Commerce and has a post graduate qualification in public policy.

Tāmaki Makaurau, Aotearoa, (Auckland New Zealand) is where Leanne calls home, and when she is not working, she is spending time hanging out with her family, or being in nature.

Jim’s core area of interest is supporting people and organisations uncover possibilities for themselves and what they can create in the world.
He finds joy in the service of supporting the success of others and it is important to Jim that opportunities to learn and grow are as widely available as possible. He is acutely aware that many of the problems facing us are requiring new capabilities and heightened demands to work together. Leading with deep humility and a unique ability to listen and ask questions, Jim is committed to helping leaders navigate the emerging future facing them.

Jim has an eclectic mix of experiences with roots in rural New Zealand and a career that has been driven by curiosity, an attraction to new things and some key values. This has seen him in very technical roles solving trade finance issues or designing ground-breaking computer systems and moving into senior leadership roles in operations, sales, organisation development and change programs in the finance and health sectors – never a dull moment! He also has over 15 years consulting experience and as a result is an experienced, leader, facilitator, coach and consultant. His strength in leadership and governance roles has been to take a whole of organisation overview that integrates change alongside managing risks and achieving results.
His practical technical and leadership experience is complemented by a deep knowledge of adult development concepts, understanding of ideas and approaches relating to complex adaptive systems and a quest to bring those ideas to life for the greater good. He is a certified coach, holds accreditations in a number of tools, has a Master of Commerce and post graduate DipHRM. Jim has a gift for integrating leadership development with business improvement, innovation, and complexity ideas – bringing people, processes, systems, and technology together to create sustainable cultures.

Currently Jim serves clients as a facilitator and coach, is Managing Director of Cultivating Leadership, is a trustee of the Growth Edge Network, a founding trustee of The Tilt Foundation and member of the Institute of Directors. After three years in Cork, Ireland with his wife (the two children are grown up) he has returned to New Zealand. When he isn’t working (if you can call it work) he can be found out in the hills on a bicycle or in the kitchen.

Diana loves to work with organisations that make a difference in people’s lives. Working with Cultivating Leadership feeds that need.

For over a decade Diana has worked behind the scenes maintaining critical infrastructure, managing projects and developing and leading a global support team.

She works with colleagues to develop strong relationships with our clients and to deliver on the promises we make.

With a passion for working independently behind the scenes, and an abhorrence for being micro managed, Diana thrives on leading the Catalyst team, supporting each person to do their best work whilst enjoying and growing in their role.

Diana is a certified Growth Edge Coach and contributing author to Human Work: Five Leadership Mindsets for Humanising the workplace.
Diana has a diverse background having worked in the private and public sectors in New Zealand, in Corporate Services, Project Management, along with Human Resource and Change Management roles. She has been self-employed and volunteered in her community.

She is the secretary for the Lume Network, and for the Tilt Foundation.
Working from home on the Kapiti Coast, Diana lives with her partner John, Miss Betty Boo the lab, and Max the cat. She can be found in regular yoga classes, playing in the garden, reading, walking the local beach and river and at various craft and design classes.

A firm believer in lifelong learning Diana aspires to write more, and is currently learning Te Reo Māori.