My purpose

I believe people are creative, resourceful, and whole, and that organizations perform when their structures let people enact the care and capability that brought them to the work. I didn’t start with that belief. I arrived at it over twenty years of watching what actually changes people at work and what only looks like it does. It doesn’t come from a defined process; it’s an emerging conversation and relationship.

My path

I began in adult learning: designing how people are trained and how organizations learn, first in hospitality and aviation, then in a global software company where I built a voluntary, confidential coaching program for a 400-person sales organization. That program taught me something I have never stopped applying. When people chose to be coached, attrition fell and leadership ratings rose by twenty percent. Nobody was made to change; they were given room to.

From there the work grew in scale. At Accenture I designed and validated a global leadership model used by more than 200,000 leaders across a 700,000-person organization, and I partnered with the Global Chief Learning Officer to move enterprise development away from the classroom and toward learning in the flow of work. I coached senior leaders through the pandemic’s shift to virtual ways of working, and I learned what it takes for change to hold when it has to reach hundreds of thousands of people at once.

I have been coaching since 2017, and since 2019 I have also served on the core faculty of Columbia University’s Coaching Certification Program, where I develop new executive coaches. Training the art of coaching is where my passion comes alive; it’s how I scale my purpose in the world.

My research

The doctorate came out of a question I couldn’t answer from practice alone: what is well-being, really, for people doing hard and meaningful work inside institutions that don’t hold still? My dissertation at Teachers College, Columbia University,The Identity of Care and the Giant Green Pillar, followed emergency medicine physicians in a large urban teaching hospital, including time inside the emergency department itself. What emerged is what I call the Identity of Care: the drive to enact care across personal, professional, and relational life that draws people to their work and sustains them in it. The finding that shapes everything I do is that becoming is a shared responsibility. People need room to act on who they are, and institutions need to support that autonomy rather than manage it. I found it with physicians. I see it everywhere I work.

My practice

Today, through Conversations with Ben, I work with C-suite executives, physicians, leaders, and other humans making sense of their worlds. I work with organizations that want change to come from the people inside them, and I develop coaches through education and supervision. I am training as a coaching supervisor at Oxford Brookes University. My clients span healthcare, higher education, professional services, financial services, biotech, technology, legal, consumer goods, and utilities.