Leadership and business coaches roundtable
A roundtable for fractional HR leaders trying to get to “what’s really going on” faster
With Polly Watt and Mike Vos, co-founders of WattNext.ai.
As organisations grow, leadership intent and organisational reality drift apart.
Most leaders don’t resist the truth - they resist exposure, loss of authority, and being judged without context. Important signals get softened, rationalised, or dismissed as “just feedback”.
For coaches working inside or alongside organisations, this creates a familiar tension.
You’re often the only person who has both the trust to challenge leadership thinking and the understanding of personalities, history, and power dynamics. But that position carries risk:
- You become the only source of the message
- Insight is experienced as subjective
- Leaders can quietly discount what they don’t want to hear
- Progress stalls and you carry the reputational cost
This is not a coaching skill gap. It’s a signal and evidence gap.
This closed roundtable is a peer conversation for business and leadership coaches who work with organisations (scale-ups through to enterprise).
The focus: How do leaders actually hear the truth - and what helps coaches get unpalatable reality across in a way that leads to action rather than defensiveness?
Shared context:
We’ll use ViVo Pulse (an AI-powered diagnostic that conducts anonymous employee interviews and delivers system-level evidence in days) as the anchor for discussion - not to demo, but to explore the problem it’s designed to address: giving coaches organisational evidence that supports their work without making them the messenger of bad news.
Format:
- Closed roundtable (not a webinar)
- Small groups to keep the conversation honest and high-trust
What we’ll explore:
- Why leadership narratives persist even when they’re demonstrably wrong
- What makes truth easier or harder for leaders to hear - and what coaches can control
- How to measure progress without survey fatigue or performative action
Who this is for:
- Business, leadership, and executive coaches working at organisational level
- Coaches supporting leadership teams, manager layers, or cross-functional groups
- Practitioners interested in stronger signal, not more frameworks
Transparency:
Separately and openly: WattNext is also interested in connecting with coaches who may want to work with us and use ViVo Pulse alongside their own work, potentially in a white-label capacity. There is no expectation - the roundtable stands on its own.
Note: when pilots are run, they require groups of 25+ people to protect anonymity and signal quality.
Leaders don’t change because someone proves they’re wrong. They change when organisational reality becomes harder to ignore than to explain away.
