Prof. Rev. Susan Goldsworthy
Helps teams raise their game and sustain performance, through secure-base leadership and the neuroscience behind it.
Susan Goldsworthy swam for Great Britain at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. She now teaches leaders what sustained performance asks of the people who deliver it, and how to build it without breaking them.
She is Affiliate Professor of Leadership, Communications, and Organizational Change at IMD, where she co-leads the Executive Coaching Certificate and directs the Leading Sustainable Change programme. Her doctorate is in organizational change (Ashridge Hult), with further degrees in the neuroscience of leadership (Middlesex and the NeuroLeadership Institute) and in consulting and coaching for change (HEC and Oxford). She is an ordained OneSpirit Interfaith Minister and an award-winning author, including Care Dare Share: The Secure Base Coach. Across more than twenty years in global companies in Japan, the United States, and Europe, she held senior roles and led work on communications, culture, brand, and inclusion. Her trademark is moving leaders from "power over" to "power with", so people perform well without burning out.
Susan has spent decades building a body of research on secure-base leadership, developed in partnership with Dr. Duncan Coombe. She chose 100Facets to make that work AI-enabled, and it has since been used many times over in personal, team, and company-wide interventions. Her Play to Thrive leadership assessment is one of those models. She created it, drawing on more than thirty years developing senior leaders, and it is grounded in Dr. Duncan Coombe's research, which is the basis of the award-winning book Care to Dare. It helps anyone who works in or leads a team sustain high performance and bring fresh energy and direction to how the team works. Her FIT for Purpose model is a holistic well-being journey across three dimensions, each holding two facets: Flow (breath and body), Intent (agency and awareness), and Trust (connection and meaning). Research-backed and judgment-free, it takes a person from a read of where they stand now through personalised coaching, expert-led classes, curated content, and a supportive community.
What Susan helps with
Change and culture have been Susan's field for decades. She works with C-level leaders, with top teams, and on company-wide initiatives. Her coaching and her work in the neuroscience of leadership help a senior leader turn knowledge into habit, by building the self-awareness and the secure base a team performs from. Her change-communications work helps an organisation make a culture shift hold, by replacing "power over" with "power with" so people commit rather than comply. Whether the work is one leader, one team, or a whole organisation, she meets people where they are and leaves them with something they can act on.