Developing Leaders & teams for the work that matters
Executive coaching, team workshops and bespoke programs for NFPs, for-purpose and public sector organisations
You are running services, shaping policy, holding teams through change. You care about the work. You are also working harder than the role should require — and the systems around you are not getting any simpler.
I help for-purpose leaders and teams meet complexity without losing themselves in it.
Three Doorways into the work
Why this work, now
Australian for-purpose organisations are facing a leadership crisis that few are fully naming.
Burnover — leaders and staff leaving because of burnout rather than career progression — accounted for 29% of NFP staff departures in 2025, up from 21% the year before. Middle leaders are carrying the heaviest load. The official response has mostly been more wellbeing programs, more resilience training, more change initiatives layered on top of leaders who are already saturated.
The response needs to go deeper.
What for-purpose leaders need is not another tool. It is a different relationship with themselves under pressure — the capacity to sense, regulate, think clearly, and create the conditions in which their teams can actually do the work.
That is the work I am here for.
Where do you sit in the reactive cycle?
Most for-purpose leaders are not burning out from too much work alone. They are burning out from leading the work in reactive mode — without the inner conditions to lead from anywhere else.
There are four reactive patterns I see again and again: Firefighter, Absorber, Disconnector, Overcorrector. Each one is a different way the role gets under your skin. Each one is costing you something different.
The Reactive Leadership Assessment is a free, ten-minute diagnostic that reveals which pattern is driving you, what it's costing you, and what it would take to lead from a different place.
The Assessment is completely FREE and only takes about 10 minutes to complete.
Meet manav
I came to this work the long way round.
I spent the first half of my career as a human rights and environmental lawyer, a criminal lawyer in remote Central Australia, and at the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. I later provided consulting support to the NSW Stolen Generations Reparation Scheme.
Then I burned out.
What I learned in my own recovery was that over-investment in an external cause can sometimes be a bypass from doing one’s own work.
I also came to recognise that impactful leadership in the for-purpose sector requires something different than any other context. This sector requires leaders to carefully navigate questions about identity, power, meaning and contribution alongside standards around performance.
So I retrained as a coach, a gestalt psychotherapist, then as a leadership coach, then as a coach trainer and educator. Over the past decade I've worked with 500+ for-purpose leaders — through 1:1 coaching, in-depth workshops, and longer transformational programs.
My work sits at the intersection of four traditions that most leadership development keeps separate: psychology, adaptive leadership, complexity thinking, and sense-making.
The leaders I work with tend to be people of conscience working inside systems that don't always know how to support them. My job is to provide a safe place for grounding, reflection and deep thinking. Equally my role is to co-create a rich transformational container that stretches and challenges you in the right ways.