I have spent twenty-five years in rooms where leadership either held or came apart.

Boardrooms. A public school district. A payments company. A social platform in a season that tested it. A candidate in the ninety seconds before a debate. A speaker in the wings before a TEDx stage.

I don't teach leadership theory. I've watched what happens when it fails — in enough different settings to know what it looks like early, while it is still a pattern and not yet a crisis. That is the whole of what I do. I sit with leadership teams and tell them what I see.

How I work
I am certified through Sherpa Coaching in Accountability and Expectations Coaching. The method I use is my own, built over twenty-five years and refined in every engagement since.
It runs on a cycle I call RAFT — Reflect, Assess, Formulate, Take Action. Teams do not change because they understood something in a session. They change because they decided something, wrote it down, and were held to it the following month. RAFT is the mechanism for that, and commitment completion is the number I report at every session.

Why a boutique style practice?

I work with no more than four organizations at a time.

That is not scarcity marketing. It is the arithmetic of doing this properly. A leadership team of five, over six months, with individual work running alongside it, does not scale past four without turning into something else — a firm, a bench, a founder who manages instead of coaches. I have had twenty-five years to decide whether I want that, and I don't.

Which means I say no to work I could do well. It also means that when I say yes, you have my attention rather than my availability, and I can tell you the truth about your team without calculating what it costs me.

That is worth more than scale, and it is the reason the practice looks the way it does.

Most people who do this work have depth in one sector. I have watched the same failure occur across sectors that have nothing else in common:
  • A social platform and a payments company, at the scale where decisions outrun the structure that makes them
  • A public school district, where the stakes are children, and the constraints are public
  • Law groups, where every person in the room is trained to argue, and none of them is trained to align
  • Agricultural and arts nonprofits, where the board and the executive director carry the same mission and not the same job
  • Political candidates preparing for debate and live press, where the margin for error is measured in seconds
  • TEDx speakers, where the entire outcome rests on eighteen minutes
The organizations could not be less alike. The way their leadership teams came apart was nearly identical every time.
That is the asset. Not a methodology I read about — a pattern library built in rooms that had real consequences, across enough of them that I can usually name what is happening in the first ninety minutes.

Leland Thompson Coaching LLC has operated out of Oakland, California, since 2012. I work with executive teams at the VP level and above, and with executive directors and boards in the nonprofit sector. Engagements are retained, not hourly, and access is by referral and qualification.

Lead With Clarity. Act With Purpose.