It all started when…

[By Clare Roberts, Founder and EXECUTIVE Coach]

 … I studied Business Management and French at university. As part of that, I was lucky enough to work at HEC, a management school just outside of Paris, in their careers department. So, way, way back then, I was one of the few students who was given excellent career guidance and tools. It was a great start. I’ve always been passionate about bringing the best out of people, and I knew from the beginning that HR would be good fit for me. On the back of that, I applied for and won an HR internship at L’Oréal, in London. It confirmed I was on the right track, but as I had worked in financial services before, and had enjoyed the people-focused, organised, fast-paced environment, I applied for HR programmes in that sector and was taken on by Merrill Lynch and later moved to Deutsche Bank.

And yes, the environment really was all about people and optimising performance, so it was just what I was looking for. I progressed quite quickly and was given amazing opportunities to work with some very senior leaders, even at the start of my career. As an HR Business Partner, I had a portfolio of work across employee development, diversity, reward and recognition, talent development and recruitment but the best part of my role was working with those senior leaders and their management teams on a personal level. That’s where my coaching career really started.

I found out quite early on that I had the ability to see things in people that others didn’t – that I had the courage (after a bit of practice…) to challenge people – and they responded to me, even at my most direct. They saw I cared, that my insights were on the mark, and so they listened, and my candor was appreciated. Over the years I worked with different areas of the organisation: large areas of IT, Asset Management, Corporate Finance, Sales and Trading and the COO. There were diverse personality types and I learnt to adapt my style to get the most out of different people. 

I was always passionate about the learning and development side, so later in my career it was a natural transition to go into L&D and I was promoted to the Global Head of Learning and Development Practitioners at Deutsche Bank. A key focus was how to embed learning and empower leaders, in line with the bank’s strategy.   

It was when I moved to Asia in 2017 that I became an external Executive Coach. Now I was truly walking the walk – doing what I talk about with my clients – playing to my core strengths. It gives me natural energy to help people be the best they can be, because driving behavioural change is exactly what motivates me. And those highly-focused changes have an enormous impact on business performance, particularly with Senior Executives. 

Seeing these powerful effects on the individual and the organisation gave me my focus going forward. The more I progressed as a coach, the more I wanted to define my offer in terms of a particular space in the market – executive coaching – and the particular approach I had developed, which is challenging yet supportive, to optimise individuals’ potential and that of the organisation. This is where I see the greatest impact. 

This is C-space.