Coach, Consultant, Academic, Speaker
Elizabeth's 30 year career has led to her focus on designing and implementing high impact, enduring, client-tailored approaches to leadership development that are evidence and mindfulness based.
Currently engaged at the Coaching Psychology Unit of the University of Sydney, as an Adjunct Fellow at Macquarie University, and Founding Director of Metamindfulness. Prior to commencing her consulting practice in leadership development, C-suite coaching and training, Dr King held senior marketing and executive positions in five of Australia’s leading pharmaceutical companies.
Her academic background includes a Science degree in Biotechnology and a MBA from Macquarie, a Masters of Coaching and Human Resource Management at Sydney, postgraduate training in Mind Body Medicine at Harvard and a PhD from MGSM, titled "Developing leaders to perform in uncertainty: The mindfulness solution".
Commencing her working life as a researcher at the CSIRO division of Biotechnology, Elizabeth’s early career focused on sales and marketing positions within the healthcare sector. During that time her achievements included classic sales and marketing objectives such as sales growth and product launches and winning an advertising award for a migraine campaign. She also instigated a range of social initiatives including global education programs for both neonatal intensive care and women with epilepsy, and an international art scholarship to support artists with epilepsy.
Over the last two decades she has worked as a management consultant, trainer and coach. The focus of her work has been the integration of evidence-based self-care and evidence-based coaching techniques to enhance executive performance and improve health outcomes spanning audiences as wide as business executives and people with chronic illness. Her current career interest embraces the focus of her PhD research and field studies - how to predict and improve leadership performance in dynamic environments.
Her PhD thesis was intended to provide insight into the challenges facing leaders who are navigating increasing levels of systemic pervasive change and resultant uncertainty. It explores the role that mindfulness might play in developing leaders and their organisations to succeed in such conditions by addressing the challenge of how to develop leaders to perform in uncertainty.
An Amazon best-selling author of "Buddha in Pinstripes", Dr King's consulting clients have included leading Australian and international organisations in the health care, financial services, technology and communications, and fast moving consumer goods sectors, as well as professional service firms.
The separate field studies and research that she conducted for her PhD resulted in five papers that outline eight methodological, four empirical and three theoretical advances for leadership development, including:
identifying the key significance of reflective skills in leadership development and the lack of rigor in evaluation of interventions;
demonstrating positive relationships between mindfulness and leadership performance;
providing a conceptual framework of mindfulness and its contributions along with an integrated view of both first and second generation mindful leadership interventions; and
outlining key themes in mindful field research.
She brings an innovative, research based focus to leadership development designed to provide organisations with the leadership talent and culture required for navigating these complex, turbulent times. Ethics, transparency, accountability and social purpose are all themes that she believes are vital to integrate into leadership development programmes.