Geraldine Gallacher

Geraldine started her career in the Ford Motor Company in Sales & Marketing. This international experience served as a good grounding for her next move into management consultancy where she spent 2 years consulting for large organisations on the subject of Performance Improvement. She returned to the client side as Management Development Controller for the Burton Group and went on to become Head of Group Management Development with responsibility for the development of the top 300 senior executives. Identifying very early on that there was a significant market demand for one to one coaching (long before it became mainstream in the UK), she launched the Executive Coaching Consultancy in 1994. The consultancy has grown significantly over this time and now has more than 50 coaches internationally.

Geraldine’s expertise is born of 25 years’ working with an exceptionally wide range of businesses and industries from fashion retail to Investment Banking. Geraldine sees her role and purpose as providing a catalyst for enhanced business performance. Geraldine is frequently described by her clients as challenging, pragmatic and insightful. Recent training in neuroscience enhances her performance-focused coaching.

She has a particular talent for helping people to consider their influencing style and how they might gain more leverage with stakeholders through slight modifications. She is skillful in harnessing people’s strengths and focusing them on the most productive areas. She is a great believer in the 80/20 rule which seeks to identify those tasks that will have the largest impact.

Since setting up The Executive Coaching Consultancy she has become known for her advocacy of board diversity and helps organisations to increase their gender intelligence by introducing them to a range of coaching interventions designed to bolster the female pipeline in particular. She enjoys engaging men in the debate and presents on gender differences in career paths and the need for a balanced board to those predominantly male boards seeking to address this business challenge. She is well attuned to the challenges faced by managers who have to balance their employees’ needs for flexibility with their company’s need for client responsiveness.

Geraldine has coached many women through the different stages of their careers helping them to successfully navigate the vulnerable maternity years, start to on-ramp again in their mid-career and find their authentic leadership style. She works well with senior women at Board and Partner level inspiring them to “sit at the table” as advocated by Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg.

Geraldine has a BA in Business Studies and Spanish and an MBA from the University of Edinburgh. She is an experienced Non-Executive Director having served 2 terms on a major construction plc board chairing their Remuneration and Sustainability Committees and sitting on their Audit and Nominations committees. Geraldine is a Master Coach with the Association for Coaching with more than 10,000 coaching hours.

Geraldine speaks regularly on the subject of “More women at the top”, “The Future of Gender Equality” and is a great believer in the benefit of diverse teams. Geraldine frequently writes about the latest in gender diversity issues in well commended blogs and publications such as The Huffington Post, ICAEW, (The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales) and the The Future of Work Hub, and is a regular speaker at Women’s networking events.

She is a member of the Development Committee of the City Women’s Network, and is also a founding sponsor of ECC’s not for profit The Good Business Initiative that works with organisations to help them build their leadership capacity and unlock their potential for a positive impact.

Deutsche Bank, News UK, Telereal Trillium, Viacom, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, Derwent, Reckitt Benckiser, Allen and Overy and Simmons & Simmons.