Susan Ennis

Susan is one of the more experienced executive coaches in the U.S. She has unusually comprehensive credentials: significant academic training, experience working inside a number of organizations as a strategic leadership development partner, and 30 years of coaching for hundreds of leaders as an independent consultant. She was coaching executives long before businesspeople started referring to her guidance as “executive coaching" and wrote several pioneering articles about coaching standards and best practices with her colleagues at the Executive Coaching Forum.

Unlike many coaches, she has management experience: she worked as a line manager with P&L responsibility at a number of organizations early in her career, so she understands first-hand what clients in similar roles experience in their own professional arcs.

Susan has coached numerous internal and external leaders over the years and has collaborated with HR leaders to establish successful coaching programs for their organizations. She has been on the faculty for the William James Graduate Certificate in Executive Coaching program since 2013, taking delight in teaching and mentoring the coaches of the future.

Susan is a no-nonsense consultant with the know-how to accelerate growth and increase impact.  She possesses the wisdom to support leaders in challenging situations, and she has a comprehensive, learned understanding about how leaders in complex, matrixed organizations can achieve results while maintaining collaborative relationships with their colleagues.

At this stage in her career, Susan chooses—first and foremost—to support organizations who endeavor to do good in the world. These tend to be values-based, customer- and patient-focused, for-profits and nonprofits that strive to operate as healthy, engaging places to work.

She enjoys collaborations with other experienced, in-demand coaches and consultants and invites them to join her when projects need more horsepower than one coach can provide alone.

Susan received a BA with honors from Harvard University in an interdisciplinary major of Psychology, Social Anthropology and Sociology. She has a M.Ed. with honors from Northeastern University in Curriculum Design and Instruction. She contributed the chapter, “Initiating Executive Coaching in Your Organization” for Executive Coaching: Practices and Perspectives. Susan was a founding member of The Executive Coaching Forum and lead author of The Executive Coaching Handbook. She also wrote the chapter, “Assessing Employee Competencies,” in Evaluating Corporate Training—Models and Issues. She has presented at numerous conferences over the years.