Executive coach to CEOs, founders, and high achievers
The skills that made you successful won't always make you effective at the next level. We'll practice skills, co-create and conduct experiments to build toward your North Star. Think of it as finding Product Market Fit for how you show up.
I work with leaders on:
Transition to bigger roles
You've just stepped into the biggest role of your career. Maybe you're a first-time CEO, fresh into the C-suite, or a few weeks into a company that's asking more of you than anything before. Yet there's probably no one above you with time to help you figure out what this version of you actually requires. Together we'll get clear on that, so you can show up fully in the seat you've earned.
The growth ceiling
You've gotten the feedback more then once. Or you've felt it yourself: a quiet knowing that something keeps getting in the way. Maybe others perceive you as a difficult person, you can’t express your true voice, or there’s an inner critic that talks you out of your own ideas. We'll name the pattern, understand where it comes from, and build a real path through it.
Executive presence
You can perform someone else's version of presence for a while. Yet at some point, wearing a style that was never yours gets exhausting. The real work is inside out: figuring out who you actually are, what you believe, and what small shifts help the outside world finally see what you already know about yourself. This is often where I go deepest with women, people of color, and immigrants who are done shrinking to fit.
Leaders I’ve coached are at these startups…
… and larger companies
What actually changes
A CEO who'd been called a micro-manager for years knew the label was accurate. What he didn't know was why, or what it would take to actually stop. He learned to identify the few decisions that genuinely had to be his and let go of the rest. His team stopped waiting for his approval. They started leading.
He'd been told he was too much: too direct, too intense. He'd tried sanding down the edges and felt hollow doing it. We stopped trying to fix his style and started understanding it. What read as prickly was a high quality bar with no clear channel. Once it found one, his board and leadership team finally felt what he'd always been trying to give them.
A VP of Engineering was the most technically capable person in the room. Outside it, he wasn't being heard. His CEO saw him as technical, not strategic. We worked on how he communicated beyond engineering: the language he used, the relationships he built, and how he positioned his thinking. He was promoted to CTO.
She'd spent years waiting for a role that would finally feel right. She kept trying to adjust to feedback before realizing that it wasn’t working. An SVP exited on her own terms, negotiated her own severance package, and launched her own venture.
Everyone kept telling her the bar was too high, and her team was burning out trying to reach it. A co-founder assumed the problem was her team's capability. It wasn't. She was reacting when work fell short but never defining what good looked like upfront. Once she started doing that, her teams started delivering. She didn't lower the bar.
“Coaching with Tutti was like leadership insurance. Without regular, honest check-ins, founders can do real damage to their companies. The ROI was real: tens of thousands in value, easily.”
“Tutti is the rare coach who will tell me the truth and call me out when I’m playing small. This is unbelievably useful to help me learn and grow, and I don’t get that from anyone else.”
“Tutti provided the perspective of a personal board, an outside source of truth, that’s not your actual board. I needed a coach who had been an operator, and who could see what was happening with other orgs and teams.”
I spent 22 years as an operator in Silicon Valley and I coach like a product person and designer using this four part framework.
Vision is where we start. Not just your professional goals, but what you actually want your life to look like in three to five years. Everything you do at work is in service of a whole life. We figure out what that looks like for you before we figure out how to get there.
Blind Spots are the places where something is getting in the way and you can't quite see it yet. I work with a lot of deeply technical people who are exceptional at what they do. And often what's holding them back isn't skill. It's confidence, or the ability to trust their gut, or anxiety and imposter syndrome that's louder than it should be. The mindset work we do together is often what unlocks everything else.
Skills are where we get tactical. Executive presence, building relationships, managing up, communicating in ways that actually land. These are things I've seen trip up smart leaders at every level. We work through the ones that matter most for where you're headed.
Experiments are how change actually happens. Each week, we co-create specific actions for you to try in your real work. You test them, report back, and we learn from what happened. Success or failure doesn't matter. The learning does.
My Coaching Framework
Coaching with Me
I’m direct and I thrive in the unexpected. I'll see the best in you, hold you to your own stated dreams, and tell you when you're getting in your own way. I call it like I see it. That's not everyone's preference, and that's okay.
I coach like a product person and a designer. North Star vision first, real experiments in your actual work, qualitative and quantitative tracking as you go. I've spent twenty-two years building things in Silicon Valley. I know what the real problems look like from the inside.
Also a contributing author to Executive Coaching Perspectives from the Field (Wiley), and published in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Forbes." Read my published articles.
Working 1-1
I work with a small number of clients at a time.
The commitment is a minimum of six months, meeting weekly or biweekly on Zoom depending on how quickly you want to move. We start with a 150-minute discovery session to co-design what the work looks like for you. From there: ongoing fifty-minute sessions and unlimited email and text support between them. For CEO clients, I will conduct a 360 assessment to help with surfacing perspectives on their executive presence and growth areas. My clients typically invest between $3K and $8K monthly.
I also use a Wheel of Leadership with many clients to assess where they are and where they want to go. Download it here.