Leadership Coaching
Leadership today requires making complex decisions, guiding teams through change, and balancing competing priorities, often without time to step back and reflect.
EdFuel’s leadership coaching services create that space.
We pair leaders with experienced coaches who have worked in education, mission-driven, and nonprofit organizations — people who understand the specific pressures of this work. Leadership coaching helps leaders strengthen decision-making, navigate complex challenges, and lead teams more effectively through structured, one-on-one support. Coaching is practical, confidential, and grounded in what leaders are actually navigating. The result is clearer thinking, stronger decisions, and the kind of confidence that comes from having a real thinking partner in your corner.
Leadership often requires navigating complex decisions with little time for reflection. As roles expand or organizations grow, leaders take on increasing responsibility for strategy, team dynamics, and high-stakes decisions.
Coaching creates a dedicated space for leaders to step back, reflect on challenges, and strengthen how they guide their teams and organizations.
When Organizations Turn to Coaching
Common signs it’s the right time:
A leader is stepping into a new or significantly expanded role
High-stakes decisions are being made without a trusted thinking partner
A leadership team needs to operate with more alignment and trust
Managers are new to leading people and need real development support
An organization wants to invest in leadership capacity across a group of staff
A leader is navigating organizational change and needs consistent support through it
The Challenges We Address
The leaders we work with are capable and committed. What they're missing isn't effort — it's a real space to think, and a thinking partner who understands the work.
Coaching helps leaders work through these challenges with more clarity and confidence:
The demands of the role have outgrown the support around it
High-stakes decisions are made without a trusted thought partner
A leader’s presence and influence are not landing the way they need to
Competing priorities make it hard to lead with clarity and focus
Team dynamics are getting in the way of effectiveness and trust
There is no consistent space to reflect, think, and lead deliberately
What You Get
Our coaching engagements provide structured, one-on-one support to help leaders navigate complex decisions and strengthen their leadership in practice.
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1:1 Leadership Coaching
A dedicated, confidential coaching relationship grounded in what the leader is actually navigating: real decisions, competing priorities, complex team dynamics. A consistent space to think clearly and lead more deliberately, built around what's real and immediate in the leader's work. Best for: senior and executive leaders, school and instructional leaders, and anyone navigating transitions or expanding scope.
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Coaching for Teams of Leaders
For organizations investing in coaching across a group of staff (managers, functional leaders, or role-alike peers) each leader works with their own EdFuel coach in an individual relationship. EdFuel works with organizational leaders to identify who coaching is right for and ensures strong matches across the group. Best for: organizations building leadership capacity across a cohort rather than one person at a time.
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Cohort & Group Coaching
Structured coaching experiences that bring leaders in similar roles or contexts together to learn, reflect, and apply leadership practices alongside peers. Common formats include new manager cohorts, role-aligned groups, and thematic cohorts focused on a specific challenge like leading through change. Best for: new and emerging managers, role-alike peer groups, and organizations building shared leadership language and practice.
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Leadership Team & Functional Team Coaching
Coaching and facilitation designed for a leadership team as a unit, focused on how the group works together, not just how individuals lead. This work builds trust, clarifies roles and decision-making, and creates the alignment that makes a team more than the sum of its parts. Best for: senior leadership teams, school leadership teams, and functional teams navigating change or misalignment.
How We Approach This Work
Our coaching approach combines reflection, practical leadership tools, and real-time problem solving.
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Diagnose
We explore leadership priorities, challenges, and organizational context, including team dynamics, decision-making responsibilities, and areas where leaders feel stuck or stretched.
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Design
We identify key leadership goals and areas of focus grounded in the leader’s role, organizational priorities, and the specific challenges they’re navigating.
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Align
Coaching conversations focus on real-time decisions, team dynamics, and leadership habits, helping leaders examine trade-offs, clarify priorities, and strengthen how they show up in critical moments.
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Implement
Leaders test new approaches and strategies within their day-to-day work, applying insights directly to conversations, decisions, and team leadership.
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Sustain
Over time, coaching reinforces practices that support confident, effective leadership, building habits and approaches that leaders can continue using beyond the engagement.
Coaches and Consultants
EdFuel coaches are experienced leaders from education and nonprofit organizations. They’ve held senior roles, managed teams, and navigated the realities of this work.
They bring that experience into every coaching relationship, quickly understanding your context and helping you think through what matters most. Each leader is matched with a coach whose background aligns to their role and goals, creating a partnership that is practical, relevant, and impactful from the start.
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Amanda Cutright
Amanda is an executive coach, facilitator, and keynote speaker who works with leaders navigating growth and complexity. As Co-Founding Partner of Wind + Sail, she has grown the firm with the mission to create communities of evolved, mindful, skillful leaders.
Known for her steady presence and strategic lens, Amanda partners with executives in multiple industries, education, and non-profit leaders and boards. Before Wind + Sail, Amanda served as Vice President of Executive Learning at Teach For America. In this role she led a national team to construct a framework for executive development and facilitate immersive learning experiences fueling a period of rapid, national expansion. Amanda began her career as a Teach For America corps member teaching 5th grade in St. Louis.
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Clara Hess
Clara is an organizational development and leadership consultant with over 15 years of experience in nonprofits and public sector leadership, including senior roles at the Anti-Defamation League, Teach For America, and the DC Public Charter School Board. She brings a practical, systems-oriented lens to leadership. As a coach, Clara works alongside leaders helping them step back from the day-to-day, clarify what matters most, and make more intentional choices about how they lead. Her approach blends structured thinking, candid reflection, and real-time application, supporting leaders to strengthen judgment, navigate complexity, and lead their teams with greater clarity, trust, and effectiveness.
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Dr. Elfreda W. Massie
Dr. Elfreda Winstead Massie is an experienced executive coach and former system-level leader with over 40 years in education and nonprofit leadership. She has coached superintendents, executive directors, principals, chief academic officers, HR professionals, and senior leadership teams supporting them to strengthen strategic execution, lead complex organizational change, and improve team effectiveness. Her coaching focuses on developing greater self-awareness and building practical leadership habits—clarifying priorities, strengthening communication, and driving accountability for results. Dr. Massie brings deep expertise in system transformation, grounded in her experience as a former superintendent and distinguished national faculty member at the National Center for Education and the Economy, and is known for helping leaders move from insight to action.
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Jennifer Barr-Weiss
Jenn Barr Weiss is an equity-focused leader with experience leading and supporting school systems and non-profits in achieving key priorities through strategic planning, coaching and team building. Strengths include internal strategy and management, growth/consolidation planning, talent-strategy development and project leadership.
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Judy Lin
Judy Lin’s leadership has evolved as the breadth and depth of her career has evolved across multiple industries, functions and roles. These diverse experiences provide valuable insights and learning that guide her work and focus as a leadership coach. She has real understanding, valuable perspective, empathy, optimism and a growth mindset to help guide clients to identify their goals and achieve them.
Judy is currently the COO at NatureBridge having previously seved as a COO of a large charter network and received her MBA from Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management.
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Kelly Harris Perin
Kelly Harris Perin has devoted her career to helping individuals and teams work better, feel better, and increase impact in their work and the world. She is an expert in healthy productivity for individuals and teams, transitions and leveling up, and 360 feedback.
Kelly began her career as a middle school teacher, then spent a decade leading teams and complex initiatives in a rapidly scaling nonprofit. Her diverse experience spanned adult learning and evaluation for new hires through senior executives, large-scale project management, and intensive 1:1 coaching to help new senior leaders start strong in high-stakes roles… all of which she coaches and trains on now with leaders across different sectors and roles.
Kelly is based in Durham, NC, where she’s currently practicing lots of yoga and Spanish, tagging along with her 3 kids on their adventures near and far, and running a pro bono coaching project.
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Kristina Campa-Gruca
Kristina Campa-Gruca is a leadership coach and organizational strategist who supports nonprofit leaders in aligning their values with their actions. With over 15 years of experience in K-12 and nonprofit organizations, she understands the complexity of leading through growth, change, and impact. Kristina has held leadership roles at EdFuel and City Bureau, where she led high-performing teams in talent strategy, team development and organizational effectiveness. Her coaching is grounded in a values-informed approach and integrates a focus on strong culture and data-driven decision-making. She helps leaders gain clarity, make intentional choices, and lead in ways that are both authentic and sustainable. Clients describe her as thoughtful, grounded, and skilled at turning reflection into action.
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LesLee Bickford
LesLee Bickford is the President of Bright Morning, where she leads the organization’s strategy, oversees all initiatives, and day-to-day operations. Prior to this, she was Chief Operating Officer at Bright Morning, and spent 15 years at a national nonprofit in a range of senior leadership roles, including Vice President of Leadership Development and Vice President of Coaching, as well as leading learning and development, recruitment, regional programming, and new site expansion. Across her career, LesLee built and scaled programs, developed leaders at all levels, and led complex, growing organizations. Today, her coaching focuses on helping experienced leaders expand their impact, strengthen their leadership, and build empowered, high-performing teams.
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Mary Mason Boaz
Mary Mason Boaz is a DISC trained and ICF and Newfield certified coach with nearly 20 years of experience working inside and alongside organizations including her own time as an executive leader of a high-growth social impact organization. As an executive and leadership coach, she works with high-performing professionals navigating complexity, transition, and growth. At the team level, she specializes in executive team effectiveness, making visible the relational dynamics underneath a leadership team’s strategy: patterns of trust, decision-making, conflict, and alignment that determine whether great ideas translate into real execution. As a facilitator and trainer, she has led group trainings, sessions and given talks across the country to thousands of participants, helping organizations strengthen leadership capability, people practices, and team culture. Mary Mason lives in Lexington, KY with her husband and two young children. She loves watching Bravo, reading romance novels, and is fluent in French.
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Melissa Kaplan
Melissa Kaplan is an executive leader in charter schooling with experience spanning classroom teaching, school leadership, and network-level roles across academics and operations. Melissa has served as a Chief Academic Officer and Deputy Superintendent, and she currently leads a multi-school organization as an Executive Director. Melissa’s coaching and counsel focus is helping leaders navigate high-stakes decision-making, board dynamics, and organizational redesign in real school conditions. She brings a strong instructional lens and a pragmatic, systems-based approach so leaders can make choices that hold and protect student outcomes.
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Miwa Kamras
Miwa brings over twenty-five years of experience as a teacher, non-profit executive and human resources leader to her work. Inspired by her time in the classroom, she spent fourteen years developing and leading teams at Teach For America, including serving as the Executive Director of Teach For America DC and a Senior Managing Director on the Human Assets team. For the past ten years, she has served as an executive coach for leaders in the education and non-profit sectors and a designer and facilitator focused on leadership development, organizational culture and diversity, equity and inclusion.
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Monique Wright
Monique Wright is a strategic and impact-focused education leader with 20 years of K-12 experience. She works with district leadership to use resources strategically and intentionally build teacher and leader capacity to strengthen teacher practice and improve student outcomes. Her experience includes building district partnerships and managing high-performing teams through the use of coaching and adult learning best practices.
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Dr. Nafeesha Mitchell
Dr. Nafeesha Mitchell is an executive coach and leadership strategist who partners with senior leaders across public education, charter networks, and mission-driven organizations to navigate complex, high-stakes challenges. Drawing on more than a decade of senior leadership, she brings a practitioner’s lens to coaching leaders through governance tensions, talent sustainability, and system-level decision making. Her approach blends systems thinking, real-time problem solving, and deep reflection to help leaders align their values with execution and lead with clarity, accountability, and impact. Through her coaching, she has supported leaders and organizations collectively serving more than 500,000 students nationwide.
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Neha Kale
Neha partners with mission-driven organizations to strengthen leadership capabilities, cultivate talent, and build thriving cultures. With over 20 years of experience, Neha has collaborated with diverse global and domestic organizations, from social enterprises to Fortune 100s, supporting leadership teams focus on people and culture to accelerate impact.
Neha partners with leaders to enhance their leadership capacity to lead, inspire, and influence others within scaling organizations, helping them build high-performing teams, establish clear alignment, foster strong feedback cultures, master prioritization and decision-making, navigate the IC-to-manager transition, and sustain work-life balance along the way.
She holds a B.S. in Marketing and Management from Purdue University, and an M.B.A. with a concentration in social entrepreneurship from the Kelley School of Business, Indiana University.
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Patricia McKee
Patricia McKee loves and believes in people, and has devoted her career to her belief in the power of leadership that is rooted in values, authenticity, and purpose. She began her career as a middle school special education teacher in Philadelphia, and has worked as an instructional coach, non-profit program and executive leader, and executive coach in school systems and several education non-profit organizations. In her current work, she serves as an executive coach for principals and administrators, supporting their leadership growth as they navigate the particular complexities of school leadership. In every role she’s held, the driving force that gets her out of bed in the morning is the opportunity to build relationships and support growth. She’s had the incredible honor of coaching teachers, administrators, and non-profit professionals for nearly 20 years, and has never ceased experiencing absolute awe at what leaders are capable of when passion, purpose and values align. Patricia’s coaching is grounded in creating spaces for reflection, learning and growth through powerful questions, deep reflection, and opportunities to practice new learning.
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Robert Oberleitner
With 18 years as a Senior Executive and over 30 years in operations management, Bob has extensive knowledge of the challenges leaders face at every level. His leadership experience, combined with coaching expertise, enables him to help leaders achieve meaningful, lasting results. Bob blends creativity with structure, integrates process orientation and systems thinking, and maintains a focus on the whole person and their unique needs.
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Sheri Leo
With over fifteen years of experience across nonprofits, school districts, and state departments of education, Sheri Leo is a seasoned leader specializing in talent, culture, and organizational change. She currently leads talent, learning, and culture at LEE, a leadership development organization that supports leaders to engage civically and increase access and opportunity in their communities. Throughout her career, Sheri’s work has focused on empowering leaders to build inclusive environments and effective management practices. Sheri holds advanced degrees in teaching and public policy, blending academic rigor with practical expertise to drive human capital excellence.
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Suzanne Lynn
Suzanne Lynn leads SGL Consulting, where she empowers leaders to navigate complexity with clarity and confidence. Drawing on experience across education and nonprofit leadership—including roles as Executive Director of the Boys & Girls Clubs, Vice President at Teach For America, and Deputy Superintendent of Talent for Detroit Public Schools—she brings a practical, empathetic perspective shaped by leading at every level of organizations. She partners with clients to strengthen leadership and organizational effectiveness while creating brave, confidential spaces for reflection and growth. Her coaching focuses on helping leaders drive meaningful change, advance equity, and build the skills to lead with resilience, intention, and effectiveness.
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Trena Drayton
Trena Drayton brings over 20 years of leadership experience spanning education, capital markets, financial services, and mission-driven organizations, primarily at the intersection of finance, operations, and people strategy.
As CFO, COO, and CHRO, she has led institutional turnarounds, structured complex financings, and built operating models that translate strategy into measurable performance. Across academic organizations and global financial institutions, her work consistently centers on aligning systems, leadership, and execution to drive sustained impact.
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Veenay Singla
Veenay Singla brings over two decades of leadership experience, including helping to found Bellwether Education Partners and The Pahara Institute, alongside over a decade of coaching early to mid- and senior-level leaders. Her work has included designing and managing coaching programs and leading program redesigns that integrate coaching with curriculum and embeds systems for impact. She focuses on partnering with leaders to navigate complexity, strengthen their leadership practice, and drive meaningful results, using an approach that combines empathy and rigor; she meets leaders where they are while pushing them to expand what feels possible – with a deep commitment to equity in leadership development.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A senior leader at a growing education organization partnered with EdFuel for leadership coaching while stepping into an expanded role. The leader was responsible for guiding a larger team, managing complex stakeholder relationships, and making high-impact decisions.
Through structured coaching sessions, the leader strengthened prioritization, communication with senior leadership, and confidence in navigating complex decisions.
As a result:
Clearer prioritization across competing strategic initiatives
More effective communication with senior leaders and stakeholders
Increased confidence in navigating complex leadership decisions
The result was a more focused and sustainable leadership approach that enabled the organization to move forward with greater alignment during a critical period of growth.
FAQs
What is executive leadership coaching?
Executive leadership coaching is a structured process that helps leaders strengthen decision-making, navigate complex challenges, and lead teams more effectively with the support of an experienced coach.
Who is coaching designed for?
Coaching is designed for leaders at all levels, including executives, senior leaders, and emerging managers. If you're responsible for guiding a team, making high-stakes decisions, or navigating organizational complexity, coaching is likely relevant to your work.
How long do coaching engagements typically last?
Most engagements last between three and nine months, depending on the leader’s goals and the challenges they are navigating. Some leaders continue beyond that initial period as their focus evolves.
How often do coaching sessions take place?
Coaching typically includes two sessions per month, though the cadence can be customized based on the leader’s needs and schedule.
Is coaching confidential?
Yes- completely. Coaching conversations are confidential to ensure leaders have a trusted space to reflect openly on challenges, decisions, and leadership dynamics they might not be able to discuss elsewhere.
Is This Right for You?
Coaching can be valuable when leaders want space to reflect, strengthen their leadership approach, and navigate complex decisions.
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You’re navigating complex leadership decisions or organizational change.
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You need a trusted space to reflect and test new ideas.
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You want to strengthen your leadership while guiding your organization forward.
Coaching also tends to work best alongside broader organizational investment. Many of the leaders and organizations we work with are simultaneously strengthening their talent systems — staffing strategy, performance management, leadership development — and find that coaching accelerates the impact of that work.
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