About ME
My Mission
To redefine leadership development by prioritising inner transformation and fostering
a new generation of leaders equipped to
navigate complexity and uncertainty.
MY Vision
To contribute in creating a world where leaders are empowered to lead with presence, purpose and impact by unlocking the transformative power of personal growth, where inner-game development
is valued as much as outer-game learning.
My name is Baz Hartnell
I’m an executive coach with over 20 years of coaching experience, during which time I have coached hundreds of largely senior leaders, mostly across the UK’s NHS and the Senior Civil Service, but also in the Private and Third Sectors. Previously a director myself, I possess both a Masters degree in Coaching and Development (awarded with Merit) and another Masters degree in Business Administration (awarded with Distinction). I am a member of the European Mentoring And Coaching Council (EMCC) and the Association Of Coaching (AC) as well as being a certified coaching supervisor.
Originally from Somerset, I now live in Suffolk with my partner and have two stepsons, both of whom have finally flown the coop. I enjoy doing Parkrun most Saturday mornings and get out walking or cycling as much as possible in an effort to offset the ravages of ageing and offset my overindulgent enjoyment of curries, a love acquired having gone to university in Birmingham with its plethora of balti houses. A recent convert to Pilates, I now recognise I should have started 30 years ago! I've always enjoyed travelling and once spent three months travelling on a truck across sub-Saharan Africa from Nairobi to Cape Town. A recent short stay in hospital gave me a possible glimpse of my future, which has caused me to reflect on how to live more fully with new appreciation.
My Motivation Behind Codifying This Inner-Game Curriculum
My personal calling these past four years has been the distilling and conceptualising of what I have learnt and practiced as an executive coach for the past 20+ years, in order to provide leaders with a roadmap to first see and then undertake their inner-game development work for themselves, as if having access to their own experienced coach, but without the often prohibitive cost of that; to help leaders learn what cannot be taught any other way. The starter for this being a free self-paced, self-development online course geared for leaders working in VUCA environments - a course equally applicable to executive coaches who coach these leaders.
I’m now into my 60s and I have felt a growing responsibility in this last quartile of my own life, to distil what I have woken up to see and by helping leaders and those who coach them, to wake up to their own inner-game curriculum perhaps earlier than they otherwise would. This, in the hope that it will accelerate the production line of ‘fit for VUCA’ leaders in the coming years, as there is no quick fix and there is such a shortage of equipped leaders.
My motivation is that up until now, as a coach I’ve only been able to develop one leader at a time, but I wanted to find a way of working one-to-many. I want to accelerate the number of leaders able to thrive in todays and tomorrows VUCA environments, especially given the unrelenting mental and emotional demands of the VUCA landscape. This, coupled with an acute shortage of leaders who can currently thrive in such landscapes, compared with the exponentially growing number of wicked problems the world has to resolve.
I’m not claiming any new typology of leadership or new coaching approach with what I’m offering. Nor am I claiming to have developed something no one else has discovered; indeed it’s going to be measured in the tens of thousands of people who have beaten me to discover our ability to evolve over our own lifetime. However, what I believe I'm uniquely creating with these insights as a consequence of being an experienced coach, is a narrative which codifies, distils and integrates around 60 conceptual ideas across the fields of leadership, adult developmental theory and systems theory amongst others, to make this inner-game curriculum visible to leaders as well as making it practicable to undertake it's syllabus. As a consequence, leaders will be able to show up potently in this messy VUCA world. After all, it was Woody Allen who said that "80% of success is showing up".