Karen Brown

“My work is about helping people, teams and organisations gain a sense of perspective on their current context, often in challenging times, get clear on their purpose and what they want to achieve, and helps them lead and collaborate, with a sense of grounded confidence, to move towards the outcomes they seek. “As a coach and spiritual director, I value the whole person – body, mind, heart and spirit – and seek to explore with clients how we are our true selves not only ‘at work’, but in all of life and its challenges and opportunities.”

I am an executive level leader, consultant and coach. I stepped down from being the Director of People at Tearfund in April 2023, a role I’d held for 6 years. (Tearfund is a global international humanitarian relief and development charity working in 50 countries including SGBV work.) I played a full role in Tearfund’s enterprise-wide leadership, led the People and Talent function which served 1,000 colleagues globally and was the Safeguarding Officer. During my tenure I co-led strategic change programmes and through the team, fostered an increasingly healthy organisational culture.

Prior to Tearfund, I worked for PWC for 23 years, initially qualifying as a chartered accountant and then specialising and consulting in organisational development, leading organisational change, leadership and management development, developing people strategy, coaching and facilitation. I have also held senior global OD and talent development roles at HSBC and Prudential.

Qualifications

MSc in Organisation Development (Ashridge)
National Training Laboratory (“NTL”) certificate in Organisational Development
Gestalt coaching practice
MBTI qualified
Qualified Spiritual Director – Rochester & Canterbury diocese
Qualified Chartered Accountant (ACA)

Examples of recent work

Consulting on a whole system change programme and application for £30m funding – working with senior executives and coaching them on how best to make the bid, and their leadership within a complex and changing system
Coaching fellow senior executives at Tearfund during significant organisational challenges and during large scale change

Coaching approach

I take a client centric, pragmatic approach to coaching. I focus on what the client wants to talk about and I help them explore issues, context, and their assumptions in service of growing their personal awareness, developing greater insight, identifying options for action and strength to act. I do this through a relational, non-judgemental, client centric approach and where relevant explore unconscious defence mechanisms and self-limiting beliefs. I start any coaching assignment by exploring the purpose of the coaching contract, any relevant stakeholders, preferred styles and ways of working. I believe in being open and authentic. As an experienced executive leader and consultant, I bring an experienced and practical perspective, as well as humour, candour and affirmation.

Waverley Learning are very vested in what they’re doing, very committed. They’re dynamic individually and collectively, they are 100% invested to the learners when they go into a program, it really is a sense of ownership of the experience that I don’t necessarily always see with every other vendor or learning partner that we use.

Lisa Smisek - Director of Learning, Kearney

There’s a credibility and a humility that you just sense when you’re engaging with Waverley Learning. I’m personally very drawn to that.

Karen Brown - Director of People and Talent, Tearfund

It is the extent to which Waverley Learning understood all the requirements, the innovation that they brought, the talent they brought. Their whole style takes the frantic pace at which we work out of the equation, the messages comes through really clearly. They’ve tuned into the challenges of our organization and made observations that have given us added value. It’s always based on our needs.

Alison Maher - Head of Learning, GWR

Their Developing Skills course consistently gets the best feedback of any standard developmental course that we offer. They’re clearly doing something right in terms of engagement, for those individuals to realise their own development within that situation. Waverley Learning listen to what’s going on, the chats that they’re having with my colleagues. They’re able to play that back, this is what’s going on in your business. As an organization, they provide great insight into to us.

John Probert - Director, Mercer

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Karen Brown

Karen Brown

Background

Qualifications

Examples of recent work

Coaching approach