Karen Morley Executive Coaching
My vision is to amplify leadership impact and invigorate leaders so that they are energised, connected and performing at their very best.
Accelerate your leadership and career growth through executive leadership coaching that helps you achieve your goals, increase your executive presence and demonstrate greater leadership impact.
Create significant, sustained behaviour change that increases your leadership success and team productivity.
Executive Coaching focuses on current performance context guiding participants to:
- Be prepared for the next challenge, promotion or organisation change.
- Fulfil your potential. Make the first 90 days in a new role count. Create success.
- Achieve higher levels of performance and maintain engagement and morale through effective team leadership. Deliver maximum impact.
- Increase executive presence. Be more mindful, more balanced and more powerful.
Find out more about Executive Coaching and how it can help you to increase your impact
My Executive Coaching guide provides information on how 1:1 coaching can accelerate your leadership development and increase your impact. It outlines my approach to coaching and the coaching programs available.
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Executive Coaching comprises four key stages:
reflection, insight, action and presence
1. Assess and reflect on your leadership strengths and gaps, appetite for change, motivations, values and context.
2. Deepen your insight into your leadership identity, and what challenges you most.
3. Become a more mindful leader. Act on your intentions. Increase your authority. Stay authentic. Review and recalibrate on an ongoing basis.
4. Increase executive presence. Be more mindful, more balanced and more powerful.
I coach leaders to become more motivated, more influential and more productive.
My passion is accelerating leadership careers and inspiring inclusion. Using the latest evidence, validated benchmarks and inspiring coaching methods, I help executives and organisations to accelerate their leadership growth.
The focus of my work is on:
• Coaching – for individuals, teams and peer-based circles.
• Collaboration – to use power for good and harness collective intelligence.
• Gender diversity – for leaders and organisations that want a fairer workplace.
• Inclusive leadership – to recognise uniqueness, unite across differences and make workplaces better for everyone.
I’m a registered Psychologist with a desire to align what leaders do with the available evidence for what works. Besides being an Executive Coach, I’ve held executive roles in government and higher education, and my approach is informed by my experience in these roles. I also have extensive experience debriefing and reporting on comprehensive assessments (eg, Hogan, Benchmarks, observation and self assessments), identifying strengths, gaps and development needs.
The result?
Strategic leaders and higher performing teams.
Coaching helps leaders to work smarter, influence more authoritatively and use their talents to their fullest extent.
I coach leaders to get more impact with less effort.
I work with talented leaders who:
have increased their responsibilities and need new strategies for leading larger teams across a broader portfolio.
seek to be more authoritative/influential with a complex variety of stakeholders.
want to increase the performance of their teams.
are extremely capable at the technical/professional side of their role (often scientists or engineers) and need to turnaround people leadership challenges that interfere with their success.
seek to be more strategic and less caught up in the day to day.
Coaching outcomes for individuals:
clearer leadership identity, more aligned with exercising role authority.
better mix of strategic versus day to day activity.
higher levels of team performance.
clearer career goals.
a more flexible leadership style.
a more mindful, detached approach to the challenges of leading.
Coaching outcomes for organisations:
stronger cohort of leaders able to achieve strategic goals
improved cultural alignment
lift in talent, relieving the top-down burden for senior leaders
increased success in cascaded change processes
more agile, responsive leaders with greater awareness of their role modelling power
stronger peer collaboration
What executive leaders say about my coaching programs
10/10: Leadership coaching helped me increase my effectiveness as a leader. There was the right balance between challenge and support in achieving my goals. Karen helped me significantly build my emotional intelligence. She was a breakthrough for me in building my confidence and identifying key leadership development areas.
General Manager, Retailer
I had the pleasure of having Karen as a coach and she taught me the importance of coaching in building and leading an effective team. At the time, I had just started a new role in a field which I was not familiar with, leading a new team with people from different backgrounds, a wide range of experiences, capabilities and varying degrees of ambition. Karen helped me to use coaching as a way to build trust in the team. I realised that the more I used a coaching approach, my team also started to coach each other. We started engaging and communicating a lot more and ultimately worked a lot more effectively as a team.
Lucy Zhou, Corporate Finance Manager, Jardines
Karen gave me a number of very useful techniques that enabled me to maintain my objectivity and my equilibrium at a very challenging time. Central to the process was a focus on clarifying my values: the process she led me through was beneficial in understanding my core values that would continue to guide me, and the new and changing values that were driving a re-orientation.
Partner, Professional Services
Overall leadership coaching was tremendously positive. I have made significant progress as a leader, a view supported by feedback from my key stakeholders. From the first session, the chemistry was right and Karen very quickly became familiar with me and my role. Meetings with Karen have provided the guidance and solid structure around which to reflect and formulate development plans with clear actions and outcomes. Karen has also assisted me in navigating through a period of uncertainty.
Executive, Global Pharma
I first met Karen Morley at a time I was having difficulty with a number of work interactions. I was recently appointed into a senior role to develop a new team and desperately wanted to be successful. However I found myself struggling to connect with the team, find acceptance with my new peers and couldn’t understand my boss’s responses. My toolbox from prior executive coaching was failing me and I knew I needed a different approach. On meeting Karen I realised I had found the difference. Karen focussed on me, the individual. Not me the co-worker or employee. For the first time I learnt to see how my beliefs, vulnerabilities, successes impacted how I responded to others within the work environment. Karen lifted me out of the details of the situation and helped me observe myself. I finally appreciated one’s work success is not just about the technical skills and delivery but is truly influenced by connectivity and how each person creates the connections. That “light bulb” moment was transformative and I believe was fundamental to my growth as a leader. It is an insight I try to pass on to others.
Dr Charmaine Gittleson, Chief Medical Officer, CSL Behring
Karen’s background as a psychologist and her enormous experience of business life enables her to be an insightful coach to senior executives. Her ability to move between the micro and the macro is outstanding.
HRD Executive, Education
Executive Coaching Programs
Executive Coaching for Organisational Impact
When you need top leaders to step up and lead change, yet they all have different development needs, a programmatic approach to Executive Coaching is a powerful option.
A comprehensive organisational briefing commences the program. The coaching approach is tailored to focus on your organisational outcomes, using consistent tools and frameworks that explicitly promote broader organisational change requirements. Leaders are briefed as a cohort, development goals are identified and shared, and accountability check-in points agreed.
Face to face coaching then takes place for individuals over either a six or a 12 month timeframe, through regular confidential and reflective conversations.
Face to Face Executive Coaching
Face to face coaching takes place over six to twelve months, through regular confidential and reflective conversations.
Explore your challenges, concerns and opportunities.
Identify practical, everyday actions that will make a big difference to how you lead.
Call or email me to discuss how a coaching program can help you achieve your goals.
Personal Coaching
For individuals who want to self-fund their own coaching boost, Personal Coaching is available for $A3,300 GST incl.
This comprises 3 x 1.5 hour personal coaching sessions with Karen, held via Zoom. In addition, you are provided with your own tailored resources to help you gain the most from your coaching program.
Plus, you’ll receive a complimentary copy of FlexAbility and Lead Like a Coach, which will help give you insight into how you can support your own continuing development.
Before meeting and engaging Karen as my coach, I hadn’t had a coach for over 15 years.
I wasn’t sure about what value Karen would add, nor did I initially think I needed a coach (one was assigned when I joined this company).
Within the first 20 minutes of meeting with Karen, 1) I knew I needed a coach; 2) I knew Karen would be the perfect coach for me; 3) I had several key areas of my leadership to develop!
Executive Coaching FAQ
Why is coaching so powerful?
Coaching is about asking questions rather than providing the solution, so it becomes self-generating. That means that even if you don’t initially know what to do and how to do it, you will be better placed to solve your own problems in the future. You decide your outcomes.
Coaching frees up your thinking about yourself and your situation, it helps you to uncover hidden assumptions, and see yourself in a fresh way. It provides new options for action.
Coaching can be a little confronting as well as exciting, as it is about change. It is an opportunity for you to be as open as you choose to be about your dreams and your doubts. And it’s powerful because it is all about you.
Unlike other development processes which can be a bit hit and miss, coaching focuses solely on you and your needs.
What should people look for in a coach?
As there’s a low barrier to entry for coaching, this is an important question to ask. Many people offering coaching have valuable skills and experience; do they have expertise in doing 1:1 work?
Psychologists in particular (such as myself) are trained to assist individuals to achieve transformative behavioural change, which is key to coaching.
Integrity is critical, and you need to be confident the coach will keep information you share confidential. Always ask about their connection into the organisation, and be clear about reporting expectations.
Check their testimonials. Are they coaching people like you, who have similar goals to you?
Does coaching really work?
When coaching is goal-focused, yes it does. The clearer you are about what you want to achieve, the more likely you are to achieve it. Making goals explicit, public, and including some ‘stretch’ increases the effectiveness of coaching.
My coaching approach is informed by a practical business understanding and is focused on accelerating leadership growth. This usually involves transformational change created through deep insight into leadership identity and exploring the coachee’s growth edge. Relevant frameworks and tools embed insight into new, more effective behaviours and skills.
How does coaching impact company culture?
Externally-sourced individual coaching is a great start as well as an adjunct to growing a coaching culture. “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”, according to Peter Drucker. And a coaching culture nourishes strategy for tomorrow’s breakfast. When leaders coach, they create a culture that is empowering and energising.
When coached, people develop, their motivation elevates, and they engage more deeply. Organisations with excellent cultural support for coaching experience 13% better business results and 39% stronger engagement. Organisations where senior leaders coach very frequently enjoy 21% higher business results.
Coaching cultures are more responsive and adaptive. Organisations need agile leaders and teams to make rapid change that sticks. And coaching creates a sense of vitality for people, which leads them to feeling invigorated at work.
Speak with me about the range of coaching options that I provide that will help you to embed coaching capability in your leaders and create a culture that pays it forward.
My career would not be where it is today without the candid, thought-provoking and ‘call-to-action’ coaching from Karen.
She taught me how to navigate my journey – through the highs and lows – with an honesty that enabled me to challenge conventions and take ownership of my destiny.
Executive coaching will accelerate your leadership career.
Find out more about Executive Coaching.
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