Jane Maitland

About

I’m an independent executive coach, writer and facilitator with over twenty years’ experience working with clients ranging from GSK and Shell to Comic Relief and Coram.

Executive Coaching

My coaching approach combines psychodynamic thinking with practical communication and coaching techniques. Since I started coaching (helping an FMCG take their top 300 leaders through a new leadership model in 2000) I have drawn extensively on psychodynamic training at Birkbeck, with Tavistock, Sandler and Bath Consulting, as well as twenty years’ experience as a communications consultant, to develop a distinctive coaching approach. One that helps people understand and address underlying patterns of thinking and behaving that are holding them back, while giving them tools and techniques to build their confidence and take action to change. Much of my coaching involves helping clients understand and improve their communication style and build their confidence, for example when positioning themselves for promotion. I also work increasingly on mid/late career transitions; helping people figure out what they want to do with their ‘one wild and precious life’ and then take the actions they need to make their life and work more meaningful. I do this through mainstream coaching and I also run Coaching Days which include walking and talking outdoors, usually in Gloucestershire, where I live with my husband, Robert, and Stanley, the Junior Office Dog.

Leadership team facilitation and development and writing

I love coaching, but I’m also an extravert. So I also facilitate senior leadership teams with a focus on ‘helping people have better conversations about things that matter’. I run team building events, and Board meetings, for example, on Board roles and responsibilities. I design and deliver workshops on a range of topics, including effective communication and mid/late career transition. And I write, both creative and copy.

What APECS means to me

APECS is, in many ways, ‘my tribe’. My first supervisor (twenty plus years ago) was a member of APECS. And when I decided to orient my business towards executive coaching some 15 years ago, I decided to join APECS. Possibly because of a terrific conversation with APECS member, Jonathon Males, possibly because of other great conversations at an APECS symposium at Henley. I was a Board member for several years, and was hugely impressed by the calibre of the membership. (I stepped down to complete my crime story, Professional Suicide, 78,000 words still in search of a literary agent, just in case you know a good one.) Subsequently, I have seen APECS blossom as a result of new members and leadership - partly because of the boost that came from remote working under lockdown. I feel a strong sense of shared values with the organisation and want to contribute some of my time and energy to helping it flourish.

Current Client work - case studies and feedback

Coaching a COO into a CEO role in a (different) professional services firm. “I was very clear from our work together that I wanted to do this role differently. It can be pretty lonely being in the C-suite. Leaving behind the friends I had made in 15 years in my previous role means I talk to you about things I don’t talk to other people about. You ask great - often difficult - questions. And you draw on your own experience of working with me, for example, highlighting the way my pattern of ‘entertaining people’ turns you into an audience. That really struck home, helped me to realise that I may be disempowering people in some way because of my drive to make them laugh.”

CEO of a family foundation who came into coaching for what she saw as ‘imposter syndrome’.

“When we first spoke I was at such a low point. When you said 'I like you and I think I can help you' it felt like the end of a rope and a way to help me climb out of my Covid-and-self-made hole. It was a boost that you wanted to work with me. I assumed, because I'm good at doing that, that we'd focus on my 'gaps' and I would be a good girl, take my medicine and apply myself to filling them so that people would want to employ me. Our work was revelatory. I'd simply never started with the feeling of being whole and my best self in the present moment and worked back from there to understand how it came about and what strengths I already had.”

Director of a charity, long term coaching and communications client - feedback on a Next Act Coaching Day. “A clear programme, thoughtful pre-work, an in-depth immersion day with great follow up and real results in a short space of time. The programme really stretched my thinking. Being guided by Jane is special. I would highly recommend it.”