Emma Mills-Sheffield

Emma’s leadership coaching and team development workshops don’t start with the stories of the lessons she learnt when she represented her country in an elite sport, or her experiences of climbing Mount Everest. But what she will tell you is how she’s led diverse and hierarchical teams on complex projects by being empathetic, human and showing vulnerability.

Too often the term “high performing team” comes with an expectation of chest-beating and bravado but she believes it’s far more important for everyone to understand and support each other as individuals. Often this gets forgotten when under pressure but it’s at this point when humility and vulnerability are powerful leadership traits for developing a high performing team.

From leading and training diverse teams, to coaching and mentoring graduates to board executives, this is where Emma thrives. So although she spent the last 15 years in project management, process improvement, training delivery and coaching in the financial services sector, creative and digital industries and engineering consultancy, it’s in the area of developing people that Emma finds most rewarding.

She artfully mixes these business skills with her experiences of resilience, growth, empathy and knowing that life is short, which means she offers a very different approach to coaching and team development work. Her leadership coaching encourages using empathy, humility and vulnerability at the core of developing a high performing team and how to effectively breakdown traditional hierarchical structures to improve communication.

You can definitely expect irreverence, dark humour, tangential anecdotes and a huge amount of love and care in Emma’s workshops which is what makes them different from your average training module.

Emma spent 15 years in industry leading major sales pursuits, sales efficiency projects, process improvements, training delivery programmes, workshop facilitation and coaching. She has worked for KPMG, WSP and in the creative and digital industries and has experience from central government and local authorities, FTSE100 and Fortune500 companies to charities, SMEs and scale-ups.

As an independent business consultant since 2019, she focuses on helping businesses become more effective but also importantly, in developing their employees as part of creating high-performing teams. Her approach is based on identifying how businesses can run more efficiently and through leadership coaching and training how employees can develop and thrive in the workplace. An area which Emma has a particular focus on now is neurodiversity in the workplace. Understanding how to build an inclusive team which supports neurodivergence, particularly for those with ADHD and Autism, is crucial in today’s business

But more importantly, and what sets Emma apart, is her experience in resilience, growth, empathy and knowing that life is short, which means she offers a very different approach to coaching and business consultancy.

Having been bereaved in her early 20s her focus on resilience and more recently understanding this to be post-traumatic growth, has shaped the way she works and the leader she has become. In knowing that life is short her focus on people is paramount to her work and creating better workplaces.

Her business advice has been featured in The Times, Metro, Marie Claire, Vitality and online training programmes delivered for Amazon UK and Uber Eats’ accelerator with Enterprise Nation, Tide Bank, Small Business Britain and BT.

Emma’s talks, workshops and podcast interviews cover vulnerability and empathy in leadership, personal and business resilience and becoming more productive whilst managing boundaries and overwhelm.

When working with businesses, her consultancy and coaching helps leaders to get clear on their strategy and put it into practice. It’s a passion of hers to empower people and to look beyond pure profit and cost reduction as a successful business is more than just the bottom line.

Leadership coaching encourages using empathy, humility and vulnerability at the core of developing a high performing team.

Core services include:
– Business strategy & planning
– Leadership coaching
– Facilitation
– Team development – coaching & training
– Organisational development
– Operational efficiency

Emma was named as one of 2020’s 100 female entrepreneurs in the UK as part of the small business campaign f:Entrepreneur – the campaign is a collection of women who inspire their peers and communities through their businesses and wider activities. She is also a Fellow of the RSA, Chair of the Board for Grassroots Suicide Prevention and she mentors small businesses through various national business support programmes and business students at the University.