Anne Starr is an executive coach, facilitator and thought partner working with leaders and teams to strengthen their capacity to respond to complex challenges with greater impact and effectiveness. Her work focuses on clarifying individual and organizational purpose, honing innate capabilities so that clients revitalize themselves and the organizations they care about. She helps clients see themselves and their situations from new perspectives, realizing the insight, inspiration and will to achieve outcomes that matter. She serves her clients as an ally, thinking partner, opposing force, champion and sometimes taskmaster. Leaders who work with Anne experience a renewed sense of purpose, integrity and being at home in the world.
Anne has been coaching leaders in higher education, finance, manufacturing, high tech, professional services, philanthropy and global non-profits since 2006. She draws on over 15 years as business manager to Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, in the organizational learning arena, facilitating the development and implementation of complex events and organizational change initiatives internationally. She spent 7 years as a partner in retained executive search, placing leaders in high tech, finance, manufacturing and biotechnology. She worked in high tech and began her career at MIT, serving as human resources officer for the Sloan School of Management.
Anne has a longstanding interest in what makes individuals and groups unique, what animates them and how to support their growth. She is a Developmental Coach, one of only 13 people certified to score and debrief the Cook-Greuter Maturity Assessment Profile (SCTi-MAP), a cutting edge, validated developmental assessment tool. She uses the Leadership Maturity Framework in supporting leader growth and perspective-taking capacity. She has been an avid student of adult development theory since taking Bill Torbert’s Action Inquiry Ph.D. class at Boston College in 2004.
Anne holds an MBA from Simmons College. She is certified by the Coaches Training Institute and credentialed by the International Coach Federation. She is a co-author, with Bill Torbert, of “Timely and Transforming Leadership Inquiry and Action: Toward Triple-loop Awareness,” (Integral Review, 2005). She is a Focusing Professional and long time student of the Gendlin Process Model philosophy.
LEADERSHIP COACH AREAS OF EXPERTISE
- Listen, question and mirror back so that personal and organizational systemic influences and opportunities are revealed in a way they may be worked with
- Surface new awareness so that different choices become possible
- Practice re-authoring habitual stories in a way that serves the client’s new purposes
- Support the design of safe-to-fail experiments, providing stretch opportunities that develop new skills and capabilities
- Surface tacit and explicit agreements so that they may be re-examined and changed, if necessary, to anchor current intentions
SELECTED COACHING AND ORGANIZATIONAL INTERVENTION ACCOMPLISHMENTS
- Coached Deans and next level leaders in large land-grant university system experiencing disruptive challenges at multiple levels; conducted numerous 360s yielding multi-voiced portraits offering insight into potential leverage points for individual change, and also maps of cultural and structural forces at play in the system itself.
- For Vice President of global non-profit, strengthened capacity for new perspective-taking that broadened array of choices for action, leading to increased strategic impact and more systematic development of subordinates.
- Shadowed management team in small manufacturer; mirrored leader behavior to provide opening for new insight and choices for action not able to be voiced before.
- Surveyed stakeholders in regional behavioral health system to determine changes that could improve service delivery in a fragmented and under-resourced system. Interviewed exemplars across the country and produced comprehensive report synthesizing data and providing accounts of what is, and what is possible.
- Gathered data from individual and group interviews with a 150-person cross-section of a renowned research institution; synthesized and articulated findings in a way the collective reported back as “fair and accurate,” opening the possibility for deeper dialogue to address long-standing issues.