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Leadership Development that Lasts Way Beyond a Workshop
I'm Lisa Merrett, a leadership development coach.
I have over 20 years of experience managing a healthcare business. Throughout my career, I dedicated significant time and resources to professional development, including participating in leadership workshops on time management, delegation, effective communication, and identifying personal strengths and leadership styles. I also engaged in mentoring, which I later discovered is very different to coaching. Despite these efforts, I found that the knowledge gained did not fully translate into my daily leadership practice, especially when challenges arose. It was only through discovering coaching that I realised why—while workshops and mentoring provide valuable ideas, coaching enables deeper exploration. giving the lessons from workshops the best chance of meaningful and lasting impact.
I am an accredited ICF coach with an empathetic coaching style, grounded in curiosity, and emphasises gently challenging my clients' assumptions, interpretations, inferences, and the stories they tell themselves.
My focus is on exploring underlying perspectives and insights rather than providing prescriptive solutions because lasting change occurs when clients generate their own insights.
I offer one-on-one coaching sessions, with a particular passion for working with new and emerging leaders. Many participants initially think they need to copy other people's leadership styles or believe they must adopt a more forceful, louder, or more technical approach to be recognised. The most meaningful transformation occurs when they release that borrowed identity and discover their authentic leadership style. It’s a highly impactful and rewarding process - not just for me, but for the client and their team.
Are you sending people to development activities?
Yet nothing is really changing.
Most organisations already invest well in learning and development — workshops, frameworks, capability plans or mentoring. These build awareness but often don't change how someone leads once they're back with their team.
Programs that result in organisational change have the following features in common. They are:
Relevant
Coaching works because it starts with what's actually happening.
Coaching is not a generic leadership model or a framework. Instead, the conversation stays close to your real and relevant challenges they are experiencing.
Human Skills
These used to get filed under "soft skills" — as if they were the easy part, or somehow optional. In practice, they're the hardest things leaders do: staying steady in conflict, building trust when it's been dented, knowing how to be honest without being harsh.
Coaching gives these the weight they deserve, because they're rarely soft and they're rarely optional. Most of what makes leadership hard isn't technical. It's how you handle conflict, how you build trust, how you show up when things are uncertain.
Personalised
There's no script. I don't have a program I run everyone through.
Coaching is shaped around the individual — how they think, what's getting in their way, what they're trying to achieve.
Two people in similar roles can walk out of coaching with completely different insights, because we followed different threads.
Connected
Insight on its own doesn't change much.
What matters is what you do differently afterwards — how you show up in the next meeting, the next hard conversation, the next moment of pressure.
Coaching keeps circling back to that: not just what you understand, but what shifts in how you act.
Practical
We work with real situations — an upcoming conversation, a decision they're stuck on, a pattern that continues to emerge or feeling overhwlmend and not knowing where to start.
Coaching always has an action - so what you take from a session is something you can use right away, and check in at the next session to explore the effectiveness.
Holistic
You don't leave the rest of your life at the door when you walk into a leadership role.
Coaching looks at the whole picture — how you think, what you're carrying, what's going on beneath the surface issue — because leadership doesn't happen in isolation from everything else going on in your life.
Where Coaching Fits
Coaching is a space where a person 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 day, rather than working through a fixed curriculum.
Coaching provides the opportunity to fill in some of the
development gaps and incorporates all of the above features.
This is what people usually mean when they talk about real change — not a new technique, but something that shifts underneath. That kind of change is relational, not transactional, and rarely as tidy as we'd like — you take some things apart before you can build them back up. In a coaching conversation, we're not adding a skill on top of how someone already leads. We're getting underneath it — the old habits and assumptions that used to work and quietly don't anymore — so something more honest can take their place. It's not always comfortable, and it doesn't happen in a straight line. But it's the difference between a leader who can recite a framework and one who actually leads differently — which is usually why the change is still there long after the program has ended.
NOT JUST A GOOD FEELING
Coaching is evidence-based
This isn't a soft add-on. Coaching has decades of evidence - based research behind it. Conversations that are targeted and geared toward action change behaviour — not just awareness.
A GENUINE BY-PRODUCT
It supports mental health
Leaders who feel supported don't carry everything alone. They cope better under pressure, and they're less likely to burn out — which, over time, is one of the ways coaching protects the people you've invested in.
Lisa doesn't just encourage you to lead - she empowers you to lead with authenticity, emotional intelligence, and impact.
One of the most valuable apects of our work together has been her knack for breaking down big, intimidating challenges, into smaller, achievable goals and strategies.
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.