Katie Isbister, Toronto

Katie is a Certified Executive Coach with 25 + years experience in leadership development, facilitation and consultation in mid to large size organizations. Katie’s background as a business leader, psychotherapist and consultant allows her to bring an unusual depth of insight, intuition and experience to her work with organizations. Katie specializes in challenging leaders to leverage their strengths while at the same time ensuring that they identify and address internal and external barriers to development. Her core competencies of leadership coaching and team development focus on creating workplaces in which people thrive, teams excel and sustainable change is ensured.

Katie earned a Masters degree in Social Work from Wilfrid Laurier University focused on working with individuals, groups and organizations from a systemic perspective. She is designated a Certified Executive Coach by Royal Roads University and is a member of the International Coach Federation. Katie has completed the Systems & Organizations Training Program offered by the Center for Right Relationship and is a trained facilitator and administrator of the Team Coaching International Team Diagnostic Process, the Hogan suite of Leadership Assessment Inventories, the Barrett Values Culture Survey, the Leadership Circle 360 Diagnostic tools and workshops, the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory and the BarOn EQ-I inventory of Emotional Intelligence.

Katie was previously the Enterprise Director of Employee Assistance Programs, Corporate Values and Employee Engagement Initiatives for a major Financial Institution in Canada. In this role, Katie provided executive and leadership coaching, facilitated the de-briefing of a variety of 360 assessments and developed enterprise processes to maximize employee engagement. Katie also served as the Clinical Director of a large Children’s Mental Health Centre and in this role placed a strong emphasis on inter-agency collaboration, team work and the design of integrated models of service delivery. Katie has provided coaching for private consulting firms, universities, the Ontario Provincial Government, Children’s Mental Health Centres, Child Welfare organizations and other not-for- profit organizations. Katie is active in her community and has served on several national and international boards. She is the co-author of “A Decade of Diversity: Advancing Women’s Careers”.

Katie’s recent work includes:

• Conducting 360 evaluations and de-brief coaching sessions with a Deputy Minister and senior team of Assistant Deputy Ministers in the provincial government
• Individual coaching with executives in the financial services sector
• Business relationship coaching to address issues of respect and collaboration
• Consultation in the public sector with two organizations going through a merger. In addition to ongoing work with the Leadership Teams on building the new culture, Katie facilitated a Design Team process with staff at all levels from both organizations as they developed new models for service delivery in the newly merged organization.