Sara Barrie - Approach

Sara’s distinctive and insightful approach to coaching combines proven techniques with the latest thinking and expert insight. With a focus on understanding the client and organisation and building trust and connection quickly, Sara challenges clients to think differently and challenge the conventional.

Sara offers a different coaching experience that is client-focused with a commercial edge. She brings learning to life with innovative thinking and a fresh perspective, by sharing her knowledge, latest research and insights, combined with a focus on strategic thinking and commercial outcomes.

As a result, she makes a transformational difference to the clients and organisations she works with.

Sara’s values set her apart. She believes strong leadership is about being:

Bold – be courageous, challenging and step up to the challenge
Passionate – be curious, insightful, energetic and committed
Collaborative – build relationships to inspire and connect with others
Insightful – share learning, experience and knowledge with others
Human – cultivate the courage to lead with humility, compassion and deliberate calm
The best you – invest in yourself to develop, evolve and achieve your potential

Sara’s approach is underpinned by three key principles:

Leadership in context

Leadership is tough. Today’s leaders need to operate in a climate of complexity and change. Whether facing business, social or environmental challenges, leaders require resilience, mental toughness and a step change to navigate the current climate and uncertainty.

Having a leadership coach that understands the complexity and context of current challenges is essential. Sara has experience of being a time-scarce executive and understands what it means to be a busy leader in a complex commercial environment.

Sara’s approach focuses on purpose, impact and outcomes:

Begin with purpose:

Quickly inspire trust and connection so clients achieve better results, faster
Focus on the client, context and their ambitions
Develop understanding of the organisation, climate and leadership challenges
Focus on key goals, critical issues and biggest impacts

Dig deep:

Deep understanding of individual needs and motivations, aligned to organisational priorities and challenges
Focus on enhancing performance for the leader and organisation to be their best
Identify personal and organisational barriers and accelerators to change
Share insight, knowledge and connections to expand client thinking

End strong:

Build resilience and mental toughness to master both ambiguity and complexity, adapt to difficult, complex and emerging challenges and make sense of their context
Commitment to action
Embed learning to achieve transformational change
Extend learning with continuous development

In this section

Sara’s ability to add constructive challenge is a significant differentiator as sadly at a senior level you can be removed from ‘real’ feedback. Sara faces this off in a grounded authentic way and that’s a recommendation for any leader to embrace.

Sarah Barrett, Transformation Director, Customer Experience Business

Sara's approach