Amara webinar: Transformation through inquiry

Jane Allen is an experienced consultant, facilitator and coach working in public and private sectors, based in the UK. She provides advice and support to consultants and coaches working in the field of organisational and leadership development. Her ambition is to encourage the best of individuals and organisations in pursuit of their highest ideals and achievements.

Jane is an experienced national and international consultant and leadership coach working in public and private sectors. She coaches senior managers and Chief Executives in Social Care, Local Government, the Probation Service, Higher Education, senior leaders within BT, Imperial Tobacco and Eli Lilley and provides advice and support to consultants working in the field of organisational and leadership development. She has extensive experience of running action learning sets at a strategic level.

Jane has published widely on leadership, coaching and mentoring; and has recently graduated from the ALIA (Authentic Leadership in Action) international masterclass in the practices of mindfulness and authentic leadership. Her ambition is to encourage the best of individuals and organisations in pursuit of their highest ideals and achievements. She believes that good performance and quality go hand.

Heidi has a M.Sc. (Econ.). She has worked most of her career in traditional and digital advertising agencies. Heidi has several national and international awards in innovative advertising, branding, design and digital service design. She started her career working as a Human Resource Manager and continued from there to key account management, strategic advertising and branding.

The last three years Heidi has served as a CEO for a digital advertising agency. During Heidi’s time as a CEO the company went through a transformation with results in financial performance, employee satisfaction, conquering new offerings, turning customers into accounts and winning both national and international awards for the first time in years.

In 1997-1998 Heidi travelled with Up With People around the world with 170 youth from 24 different countries. The group managed and performed a 2-hour musical, did community service and lived in host families in each of the 90 places the group visited. This experience did not only result in contacts all over the world, but also in becoming highly flexible and adaptive to new situations and cultures.

Heidi is a regular speaker at Business Forums interested in her personal entrepreneurship and transforming ability.

Bill is Leadership Professor Emeritus at Boston College. He has consulted worldwide and served at numerous boards. Bill’s leadership article “Seven Transformations of Leadership” was selected as the “10 best ever” by Harvard Business Review. He is also the father of the Global Leadership Profile (GLP).

Having received both his BA in Politics and Economics and his PhD in Individual and Organisational Behavior from Yale, Bill served as Founder and Director of both the War on Poverty Yale Upward Bound Programme and the Theatre of Inquiry. He also taught leadership at Southern Methodist University, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and then, from 1978-2008 at the Carroll Graduate School of Management at Boston College, where he also served as Graduate Dean (the BC MBA programme’s ranking rising from below the top 100 to #25 during his tenure) and later served as Director of the Organisational Transformation Doctoral Programme.

In addition to consulting companies, not-for-profits, and governmental agencies, Torbert has served on numerous Boards, notably at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care when it was rated the #1 HMO nationally in the US; and, for twenty years, at Trillium Asset Management, the original and largest independent Socially Responsible Investing firm, founded by Bill’s friend Joan Bavaria, a rare CEO who was at once visionary, strategic, executive, and also truly collaborative.

Despite her young age, Maria has often found herself in positions of responsibility and leadership, which has ignited a growing interest in leadership development. She wishes to be part of the change in transforming work life towards more humane and conscious direction, in this way contributing to the overall wellbeing of the people. She believes that learning to connect with ourselves and finding small shifts in our thinking and actions have potential for creating a more sustainable and enjoyable work life, benefiting both the individuals and the wider system.

Maria has a master’s degree in management and international business from Aalto University (Helsinki Finland). During her studies she completed a successful student consulting project for one of the biggest media companies in Finland, and worked as a COO and CEO of an international dance school. Dance and movement have guided her towards developing a strong mind-body connection, which is a theme she wishes to bring to the discussion about wellbeing at work and leadership development. Maria also has strong interest towards psychology and she completed her Master’s thesis about collective psychological ownership in self-organising, inter-organisational software development teams. 

Currently Maria's responsibilities in Amara include project management, communication, marketing and working as a junior consultant alongside the rest of the Amara team.