Anna helped me shape my own authentic leadership style rooted in my values and supported by the best practices in the leadership field.
Baira DyakievaGlobal Head of Marketing, Google
For executives: coaching and advisory
The role got harder, and the things that used to work stopped working
Executive coaching and advisory for C-suite and senior leaders through the moments that decide a career: the bigger role, the merger, the turnaround, the AI mandate, and the patterns underneath them that are hard to see from inside.
- ICF Master Certified Coach, Top 1% Globally
- Professional Fellow, IOC, McLean/Harvard Medical School
- Writes for Forbes
- MIT Professional Education
- Author of Leaderwired
Executive advisory
Someone to think with when the stakes are highest
The gap between where you are and what your role demands next is not a knowledge gap. You already know what good leadership looks like. The gap is architectural: it lives in patterns you cannot see because you are inside them.
Growth reveals those patterns. Every organization reaches the point where the skills that got you here will not get you there, where decisions carry higher stakes, and where the culture either accelerates the strategy or quietly undermines it.
Executive coaching at this level is not advice. It is a systematic process of making the invisible visible, rebuilding the internal operating system that drives every decision, and making sure the change holds under real-world pressure.
In an era when AI is reshaping every industry, the leaders who do well are the ones who build the human capabilities technology cannot replicate: adaptive decision-making, emotional intelligence, and the willingness to lead through discomfort rather than around it.
Who this is for
This partnership is designed for you if
- You lead at the C-suite or senior vice president level in a complex organization
- You are navigating a high-stakes transition, promotion or turnaround
- You are analytically minded, excel at technical complexity, and want to sharpen influence, presence and strategic leadership
- You have hit a ceiling you cannot think your way past
- You want a thinking partner, not a cheerleader
- You value confidentiality as much as competence
- You are ready to invest in yourself at the level you invest in your business
- You have been told you are ready for more and want to close the gap between capability and impact
This may not be the right fit if you are looking for a one-time motivational session, a prescriptive step-by-step program, or early-career general coaching.
Anna works with executives in person in Medford and across Southern Oregon, and virtually with leaders nationwide. Clients have included senior leaders at Fortune 500 companies across tech, healthcare, finance and government.
In their words
Leaders who came for exactly this
Senior leaders in tech, healthcare and finance on what changed. Every line is theirs; the full testimonials are one click away.
Anna has a unique ability to partner, challenge and provoke deep introspection that open you up to a powerful reframing of your perceptions.
Sean McKayCustomer Experience and Technology Leader, PayPal
This partnership helped me with the clarity I needed to take some decisive steps in relation to my career.
Freeda RegoEVP, Head of Operations, Cigna
Formats
One leader, a pair, or the whole team
Most engagements begin with one leader. Many expand: to the leader’s dyad or triad, and to the executive team whose collective pattern decides what the organization can do.
Executive coaching
One-to-one advisory for C-suite executives and senior leaders carrying enterprise-level responsibility: the inflection points, the high-stakes calls and the patterns underneath them. Six to twelve months, following the process on this page.
Programs and pricingDyad and triad coaching
For leaders who share accountability: physician and administrator dyads, physician, nurse and administrator triads, co-founders, and any two or three leaders whose working partnership decides what the organization can do. Shared goals, shared measures, one relationship coached as a unit.
Ask about a dyad or triadExecutive team development
For teams whose members are each effective and whose collective operating pattern is not: alignment on decisions, roles and the few behaviors that matter, built through the team’s real agenda rather than an off-site exercise.
Team developmentHow it works
From first conversation to lasting change
Strategy session
A confidential thirty-minute conversation: what is at stake, what has already been tried, and whether this is the right fit. No pitch.
Diagnostic
A deep look at your leadership context and goals. The instrument fits the question: the EQ-i 2.0 or EQ 360, the Energy Leadership Index, or stakeholder interviews.
Engagement design
A coaching architecture built for your reality, with the success measures agreed before the work begins.
Partnership
Ongoing advisory in the Stakeholder Centered method: the people around you see the change and say so, at ninety days and at close.
The method
Stakeholder Centered Coaching
Anna is a Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coach. The method involves your key stakeholders from the start, measures progress quantitatively, and ties the engagement to behavior change the people around you can see. The coaching is ongoing advisory: the people who work with you see the change and say so, at ninety days and at close. Progress is what your stakeholders report, not what we assume. If you follow the process, you will improve. That is not marketing. That is methodology.
The approach
A methodology built in the complexity of real leadership
Every engagement draws on the Leaderwired methodology, an integrated system of frameworks built through sixteen years of working with leaders at the highest levels. It is neuroscience-informed, business-context aware, and tailored to the specific complexity of your situation. The framework adapts to you, not the reverse.
Three integrated capabilities
The methodology equips leaders with the mindsets to see clearly, the skillsets to act decisively, and the systems to scale what works: the human capabilities that create advantage in an AI-disrupted world. It is the framework behind Anna’s book, Leaderwired: The AI-Era Leadership Playbook for Transforming How You Think, Decide and Lead.
The foundation: strategic discomfort
At the heart of Leaderwired is a principle most development programs avoid. Meaningful change requires intentional tension: the willingness to confront difficult truths, make uncomfortable decisions, and lead through resistance rather than around it.
This is not discomfort for its own sake. It is the catalyst that converts insight into action. Leaders who work this way make the difficult decisions others defer, have the conversations others avoid, and drive the changes others merely discuss.
Supportive and demanding
What the method feels like from the inside
Anna is both supportive and demanding, the best combination I could ask for from a coach.
Casey LowInternational Law Firm, Partner
Her ability to challenge and reshape my perceptions has been instrumental in maintaining my focus on key goals.
Tony YouseffiExecutive Director, Commonwealth of Kentucky
I had held strong limiting beliefs for a long time, and Anna was able to identify and help me to shift them.
Alison WongGrowth Marketing Leader, Google
Strategic discomfort in action
Three domains where leaders most often stall
Efficiency
From pressure to performance. Organizations facing cost-reduction mandates usually choose between two flawed approaches: across-the-board cuts that damage morale, or incremental improvements that never deliver meaningful impact. Coaching here develops the capability to harness the productive tension of resource constraints and to make difficult decisions with both analytical precision and emotional intelligence.
Innovation
Calibrated creative tension. Disruptive innovation requires disrupting internal comfort first, and most innovation initiatives stall because the organization lacks the leadership capacity to sit in the discomfort of a creative breakthrough. Leaders learn to calibrate productive tension within teams and to articulate a vision compelling enough to pull people through the discomfort of challenging established assumptions.
Transformation
Discomfort as catalyst. Large organizations with entrenched comfort cultures face an inevitable choice: transform or become irrelevant. Traditional change management falls short because it tries to minimize the very discomfort that drives meaningful evolution. Executives learn to calibrate, introduce and navigate necessary discomfort, moving the culture from comfort-seeking to tension-harnessing.
The AdvantEdge difference
Partnership, a systemic view, and accountability you can measure
Strategic partnership, not a vendor relationship
We do not parachute in with a pre-packaged program and disappear. We become a thought partner: learning your business, understanding your culture, and adapting the approach as your challenges evolve. Clients do not hire us for a project. They partner with us for change that lasts.
A systemic approach to change
Change is addressed at three interconnected levels.
- Self leadership. The inner game: managing your own reactions, decisions and presence under pressure.
- Team excellence. The room dynamics: turning talented individuals into a team that performs as one.
- Cultural transformation. The system: reshaping how your organization operates, communicates and retains talent.
Accountability that matches the stakes
Anna is a Marshall Goldsmith Stakeholder Centered Coach. The method involves your key stakeholders from the start, measures progress quantitatively, and ties the engagement to behavior change the people around you can see. If you follow the process, you will improve. That is not marketing. That is methodology.
Inside the executives pillar
Four ways the work is shaped
Most engagements begin with one leader. The focus is set in the strategy session and can shift as the role does.
Executive coaching and advisory
Six to twelve months with Anna on the decisions that carry the most weight: the bigger role, the merger, the turnaround, the AI transformation. Measured by the stakeholders you work with, not by the coach.
Programs and pricingEmotional intelligence coaching
For leaders whose technical judgment is trusted and whose impact on the room is not yet what it could be. Starts with an EQ-i 2.0 or EQ 360 baseline and a full debrief.
Emotional intelligence coachingNew leader assimilation
The first ninety days in a new role, done deliberately: expectations surfaced, the team heard, and the relationships that decide the next two years established early.
New leader assimilationThe Collective
A peer group instead of a coach: a monthly leadership circle for senior executives in Medford who want the room, the challenge and the accountability without a one-to-one engagement. $6,000 a year, application only.
The CollectiveProof
100% of participating executives were rated more effective by their own stakeholders after eighteen months. Staff turnover fell from 13% to 1%.
A major U.S. financial institution, 2026
I came to her to work on professional development, and I finished with having a clearer understanding of myself, which benefitted me beyond just my career.
Ariana FinlaysonGlobal Marketing Leader, Meta
She transforms skeptical teams into eager collaborators… My team now collaborates with far more patience and understanding, and we’ve seen a noticeable drop in miscommunications. Anna is the rare coach who can light a fire under a team while still making everyone feel safe enough to grow.
Holly HarrisonSenior Director, Space and Critical Infrastructure, Amentum
Anna has been the single most helpful voice in my coaching journey. Within only a few sessions she provided me with spot-on good insights.
Laura NovoaStaff Software Development Engineer, Tesla
Leaderwired Institute, the AI-native engine
The training that works never scaled. The training that scaled never worked.
Benjamin Bloom proved it in 1984: a learner with a tutor outperforms 98 percent of a classroom. Forty years later, leadership development still runs on the same trade-off. The offsite and the course scale; the coach does not. Leaders attend, absorb, return to their desks, and revert.
Leaderwired Institute is the answer Anna and Justin built: an AI-native engine, trained on the method you meet in this practice, that evaluates every leader, develops them through unscripted practice against live scenarios, coaches them between conversations, and advances them only on demonstrated mastery. Every engagement with Anna can include it, so the work continues after the session ends and progress is measured, not assumed.
- Evaluate
- Develop
- Coach
- Reinforce
Pricing
What it costs
Transform is a six-month partnership at $8,200. Empower is a year with Anna at $19,500. Accelerate, for a first-time manager, is $4,700 for three months. Every price is published: see programs and pricing. Prices are for one leader. Company-sponsored engagements add stakeholder interviews, a sponsor alignment and a closing report, and are quoted for that scope.
Questions
What leaders ask before engaging
What is the return on executive coaching?
It depends on what you measure and whether the work gets done, so every engagement begins with success measures tied to business outcomes: decision speed, stakeholder alignment, retention, and effectiveness as rated by the people who work with you. Progress is what your stakeholders report at ninety days and at close, not what we assume. The one client result we publish is in the proof section above.
How is AI-era leadership coaching different from traditional executive coaching?
Traditional executive coaching addresses general leadership competencies. AI-era coaching addresses the cognitive and strategic shifts leaders have to make as AI changes their organizations: redefining decision-making authority between people and AI systems, leading teams through the change, and building cultures that use AI without losing the human edge. Anna’s Five AI Leadership Shifts framework was designed for exactly this.
What does an ICF Master Certified Coach bring to the work?
The MCC is the highest credential the International Coaching Federation awards, earned through documented coaching experience and a rigorous evaluation of coaching mastery. For a senior leader it means working with someone whose practice has been assessed at the top of the profession, which matters when the stakes involve enterprise-wide change, board-level dynamics or a career-defining transition. Anna Barnhill is an ICF Master Certified Coach, Top 1% Globally.
How long does an engagement typically last?
Most engagements run six to twelve months, with sessions on a regular cadence set by your objectives and organizational context. The work begins with a strategy session to define goals and success measures, followed by structured one-to-one coaching built on the Leaderwired frameworks, including the 7-5-3 Human Upgrade Code and CLEAR PACE. Formats and pricing are on the programs page.
Can executive coaching be combined with team development?
Yes, and many engagements do. When a senior leader’s growth opens a gap between their own evolution and the team’s operating patterns, combining individual coaching with team development moves the whole system faster. The House of Empathy framework bridges individual leadership shifts and team-level change. See executive team development.
From the leaders who endorsed Leaderwired
A comprehensive, multi-layered system that moves from personal transformation to team culture to the unique challenge of leading through AI. This book is a companion to a complex and challenging leadership journey, and Anna is the sherpa you want by your side.
Ronan DunneFormer CEO, Verizon Wireless
Drawing on academic rigor, neuroscience-informed insight, and deep experience developing senior leaders, Anna Barnhill offers a clear framework for why so many transformation efforts fall short in the AI era. A timely and substantive contribution to how we prepare leaders for the future of work.
Jill BruningChief Technology Officer, Amentum
Transformation begins with the ‘me’ — and LeaderWired gives leaders the mirror and the map to see clearly and move forward with purpose.
Claus Torp JensenFormer Chief Innovation Officer and EVP of R&D and Technology, Teladoc Health
Thirty minutes with Anna
No pitch, no deck. What is at stake for you, what you have already tried, and whether this is the right fit. If it is not, she will say so and tell you what is.