Helping successful people think differently about how they lead, work and live.
Johnson & Johnson, Bayer, Perrigo, Ascensia, L'Oréal, Colgate-Palmolive, Mars, American Express, Medidata and Healthfirst
Wendy Van Besien has spent her career curious about people, what drives them, what gets in their way, and what allows them to do their best work and live more fully. Today she is an executive coach and leadership advisor who works with senior leaders and teams across global organizations. Her work sits at the intersection of leadership, human behavior, performance and flourishing.
Before becoming a coach, Wendy spent more than 20 years in business, including brand leadership roles at Johnson & Johnson and earlier experience at Ford Motor Company. She understands leadership not simply from studying it, but from living inside organizations, navigating competing priorities, difficult personalities, organizational change, high expectations and the very human dynamics underneath it all. For more than a decade, she has brought that perspective to executive coaching and leadership development.
Great leadership begins with understanding people, ourselves and those around us.
Leaders create environments. Through what they notice, what they encourage, what they tolerate and how they respond when things get difficult, they shape whether people speak up, take risks, use their strengths and do their best work. Grounded in leadership development, Positive Psychology and a lifelong fascination with what helps people thrive, Wendy's work comes back to a simple idea: when we understand people better, we create the conditions for stronger leadership, healthier teams and better performance, and give people a greater opportunity to flourish along the way.
Most leaders can describe the kind of leader they intend to be. The more interesting question is what people actually experience. Do people tell you the truth? Bring you bad news early? Challenge your thinking? Wendy explores the space between leadership intention and leadership impact.
Most of us have one. The employee whose performance we keep working around. The boss we haven't challenged. Wendy explores why smart, capable people avoid conversations they know they need to have, and how avoiding discomfort often creates something far more difficult.
The qualities that helped us become successful don't always serve us in the same way forever. High standards may quietly become control. The question isn't whether your strengths are still strengths. It's whether you know when they're working for you, and when they're not.
Organizations hire smart people and then sometimes unintentionally teach them not to speak. Wendy explores what happens when offering a different perspective simply isn't worth the cost, and what leaders may unknowingly be doing to create that environment.
Successful people can become extraordinarily good at functioning. But functioning well and flourishing aren't necessarily the same thing. If nothing were wrong, but something were missing, would you know what it was?
Sometimes the right question is far more useful than another answer.
A short conversation that gives people something increasingly difficult to find. A little space to stop, think and perhaps see something differently. No deck full of slides. No long presentation.
One question. Twenty minutes. A willingness to think. Wendy brings the question.
Wendy Van Besien is an executive coach, leadership advisor and speaker who helps successful people think differently about how they lead, work and live. A former Johnson & Johnson brand leader with a B.S. from Cornell and an MBA from Columbia Business School, Wendy brings more than three decades of business and coaching experience to conversations about leadership, human behavior, performance and flourishing.