Schemas in Leadership Consulting

For organizations ready to work with the patterns actually running them.

Your Organization Has an Operating System No One Installed

Every organization runs on two systems. The one above the waterline is visible: the strategy, the org chart, the values on the wall, the processes in the handbook. The one below the waterline is not — and it is the one actually in charge. It decides how conflict is really handled, whose voice really counts, what really gets rewarded, and what everyone has quietly agreed never to say in the meeting.

That second system is built from schemas: deep, early-formed blueprints that individual leaders carry into their roles, and collective patterns the organization itself has formed through its history — the founding crisis, the failed launch, the leader who punished bad news. Schemas are not flaws. They are old solutions. But when the context changes and the pattern stays, the organization starts working against itself: initiatives that stall for no visible reason, cultures that resist every change program, leadership teams that agree in the room and diverge in the corridor.

This is the territory my book Schemas in Leadership: The Hidden Architecture Behind Executive Performance, Culture, and Happiness maps — and the territory this consulting practice works in. Not another framework layered on top. The layer underneath, where change becomes durable.

How I Work: Name, Honor, Choose, Rehearse — at Organizational Scale

The revision arc at the heart of the book applies to organizations exactly as it applies to individual leaders:

Name. We diagnose the schemas actually operating — in key leaders, in the leadership team, and in the culture. I use structured interviews, stakeholder-informed 360s, Hogan, CliftonStrengths, schema-based reflective inventories, and team diagnostics, alongside any data you already hold. The output is a clear, evidence-based picture of the pattern beneath the presenting problem — including the things being felt but not said.

Honor. Every schema was adaptive once. We identify what each pattern protected — because patterns dismissed as dysfunction dig in, and patterns understood as old intelligence become workable. This step is what makes the change stick where culture programs usually fail.

Choose. With the pattern named and understood, the leadership team designs the deliberate alternative: how decisions will be made, how disagreement will be voiced, what the organization will reward from here. Not aspirational values — operational agreements.

Rehearse. A schema only rewrites in the moments when it fires. We embed the new pattern in the live flow of work — the Monday meeting, the board prep, the performance conversation — with coaching support until the new response is the default, not the exception.

Consulting Engagements

Schema-Based Culture Diagnostics — a structured assessment of the collective patterns driving your culture: the real decision rules, the undiscussables, the schema collisions between functions or legacy organizations. Delivered as an honest, board-ready picture with a prioritized path forward.

Leadership Team Consulting — sustained work with your executive or senior team to surface how individual schemas interlock into a team-level pattern, and to build the shared operating agreements the strategy requires. Grounded in systemic team coaching practice and the HexHelix model I co-created.

Organizational Change and Integration — schema-informed support for the moments when patterns collide hardest: mergers and acquisitions, restructurings, scaling from founder-led to professionally managed, leadership succession. Culture clash is schema clash — and it is workable when you treat it that way.

Schemas in Leadership Programs — In-House Delivery — the book’s methodology delivered as a leadership development program inside your organization: cohort-based, applied to your leaders’ real pressures, from a single intensive to a multi-month journey for a leadership population.

Certification and Licensing — for organizations and consulting firms that want to build internal capability: training and certifying your HR, OD, and coaching professionals in schema-informed leadership practice, with licensing options for the Schemas in Leadership curriculum.

Keynotes and Executive Briefings — for leadership conferences, offsites, and board sessions that want a rigorous, memorable introduction to the hidden architecture beneath executive performance and culture.

Why Work With Me

Consulting on organizational patterns requires someone who has carried them. I spent 25+ years in senior corporate roles — Global Head of Talent at AmRest across twenty countries and 19,000 employees, VP at Endava serving global financial institutions, Senior Director at Globant leading an $80M portfolio, CHRO, and market-opening leadership with IHG — before founding MentorsPro LLC. I have run the change programs, sat through the integrations, and felt the culture from the leadership chair, not only the consulting one.

I bring that operating experience together with an unusually deep methodological base: ICF Master Certified Coach (MCC), Advanced Certification in Team Coaching (ACTC), EMCC ESIA Supervisor, Chartered MCIPD, clinical training in Schema Therapy — the tradition this methodology is built on — and faculty and mentor coach roles at Rice University’s Doerr Institute for New Leaders. My clients have included leaders and teams at Amazon, Google, Walmart, Capital One, and Takeda.

And the methodology is not a personal style. It is published — in Schemas in Leadership and in Becoming a Coaching Supervisor and Coach Mentor (Passmore et al., 2025), where the HexHelix model appears — taught through accredited programs, and used to train and supervise other practitioners. What your organization gets is a documented, peer-reviewed body of work.

Begin With a Diagnostic Conversation

Every engagement starts the same way: a confidential conversation about what your organization is carrying — the initiative that keeps stalling, the dynamic that keeps returning, the change that will not hold — and an honest assessment of whether schema-level work is what the situation requires. No deck, no pitch. A diagnosis, and a recommendation.