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I work with new and emerging leaders to set the foundations of how they lead — because how someone leads early shapes everything after it. Their team's trust, whether people stay and how much gets done.

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Most organisations do a good job investing in learning and development —workshops, frameworks, e-learning, mentoring programs, capability plans. These build awareness and give people the right language and ideas — but rarely change how they actually lead once they're back with their team.​

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Programs that actually change how someone leads tend to have a handful of the following things in common. It's rare to find all of them in one workshop, however good the facilitator is — and that's less about what's wrong with any single program, more about what a workshop was ever really built to do. 

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Relevance

The programs that shift something real start with the actual challenge a business is facing, not a generic list of leadership competencies. When a leader can see the straight line between what they're working on and the problem it's meant to solve, they engage with it properly. When that line isn't there, it's just another day out of the office.

Personalised to the individual

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It's easy to fall into one-size-fits-all development, especially when budgets and time are tight. But every leader is carrying something different — different strengths, different blind spots, different things pushing them or holding them back. Real change starts with actually understanding the person in front of you, not running everyone through the same material and hoping it lands for all of them.

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Practical and immersive

Knowing what to do and being able to do it when the pressure's actually on are two different things. The leaders who genuinely change are the ones who get to practise the hard moments somewhere safe first — try something, get it wrong, get honest feedback, try again — before it counts for real.

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Human skills that can't be replaced with technology

Empathy, self-awareness, real connection, curiosity — these often get filed under "soft skills," but they're the skills that actually make someone worth following. They're also the hardest to build from a course or a tool, because they don't come from information. They come from practising with another person, over time, in a relationship that can hold the awkward stuff.

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Connecting development to behaviour change

When you can point to real shifts in how leaders are actually behaving — not just how a session was rated on a feedback form — the whole conversation changes. Development stops sounding like a cost and starts sounding like something worth investing more in.

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Where coaching fits

Coaching is where all of the above actually gets addressed — the personal, the practical, the human, the follow-through. It's a one-on-one space where a leader can talk through what's really going on for them: a conflict they've been avoiding, a decision they can't quite make, the way they lead when things get hard. We follow the threads of whatever's real for them that week, rather than working through a fixed curriculum.

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About 

I'm Lisa Merrett, a leadership development coach. I work with clients face to face across the Northern Rivers NSW, and online everywhere else.

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I ran my own healthcare business for over 20 years, with my own staff to lead. I did the usual round of professional development along the way, and none of it really stuck. It wasn't until I found coaching that I understood why. I had my own insecurities to work through, more self-awareness to build than I'd realised, and coaching was the best modality to provide awareness and change.

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I'm an accredited ICF coach. My style is firm, and I'll challenge my client, but always with empathy and curiosity. I'm interested in what's actually going on underneath, not in telling anyone what to do.

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New and emerging leaders are whom I love working with most. Many arrive copying someone else's leadership style, or believing they need to be tougher, louder or more technical to be taken seriously — and lose themselves somewhere in the process. The real shift happens when they let that borrowed version go and find their own authentic way of leading. It's a genuinely impactful space to be working in.

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If you want the development programs you're running to create lasting change, I'd love to talk about how coaching might sit alongside them.

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