Executive education and advisory
Social capital in organisations
I work with organisations and senior professionals on how relationships shape careers, collaboration, and business performance. I conduct seminars, programmes, and consulting projects grounded in current research.
Introduction
Who I am
I research how social capital and professional relationships impact careers and business performance. I work with organisations and senior individuals to put the latest research in these areas into action.
My doctoral work at the University of Exeter uses organisational network analysis to explain how the informal structure of a firm produces unequal career outcomes. Its central question is what happens to the social capital of professionals when they become parents. It bears on staff retention, progression, and team performance.
Before returning to academia I spent two decades in senior strategy roles across Europe, Asia-Pacific and Australia.
Academic
Doctoral researcher in organisational behaviour and social networks, University of Exeter. I teach leadership at postgraduate level.
Industry
Twenty years in senior roles: Head of Strategy and Analytics at Vodafone Group, Senior Director of Corporate Strategy at Cognizant, Principal at Analysys Mason, and Associate Director at KPMG.
Education
MBA, INSEAD.
Research
Published in The Leadership Quarterly and The Conversation. Conference papers at the Academy of Management and the Sunbelt Social Network Conference.
Expertise
Where my work concentrates
Social capital in organisations and careers
Advantage, resources, and power are accessed through relationships. Position in the informal structure of your firm affects your career. The structure of social relationships in a firm affects business performance.
Managing your own social capital
Professionals can actively manage their network by understanding its structure and investing in the right relationships. The aim is a deliberate network rather than an accidental one.
Social capital and parenthood
My research examines how becoming a parent impacts an individual's social capital, and why this is different for mothers and fathers. The effects persist beyond the period of parental leave and can show up in progression and retention.
What this means for organisations
The informal structure of a firm is measurable, and it can be influenced. Mapping it shows where collaboration fails, where knowledge stops moving, and where gendered gaps surface as attrition amongst senior women and stalled pipelines. Both the performance costs and the equity costs are open to intervention once they are visible.
Services
How I work with clients
Executive education
Seminars and programmes for corporate audiences and professional networks.
Sessions turn the latest social science research into clear business insights. Participants leave with something they can apply to their own careers. Leaders leave with a better understanding of what influences the performance of their organisation.
Formats- One-hour session
- Half-day workshop
- Full-day programme
- Multi-day programme, delivered in modules
Consulting and people analytics
Consulting projects in people analytics and organisational network analysis.
These projects can measure how an organisation actually works, and show what the org chart cannot: who collaborates, how knowledge flows or doesn't, and where the informal structure is costing the business performance and people.
What it reveals- Where collaboration breaks down between teams
- Who sits at the edge, and is at risk of leaving
- Whether women and parents face unseen disadvantages
- Who holds influence without the title, and who is overloaded
Track record
Selected engagements
Executive education. Seminar on networks, gender and the motherhood penalty for the firm's internal women's network.
Gave participants a shared vocabulary for informal barriers and a method for auditing their own networks.
Executive education. Seminar on how professional networks shape progression, and where the motherhood penalty forms.
Made a largely invisible mechanism legible to a technical, male-majority audience and its leadership.
Organisational network analysis. Whole-network study of a 1,000-person B2B sales organisation.
Created the evidence base for a sales transformation: collaboration inside the salesforce and the way teams approached clients were redesigned around the findings.
Publications
Selected writing and research
- Networking can boost your earnings and get you promoted, but it's harder for women to reap the benefits The Conversation, 2026
- Think political leader, think he or she? A multi-country test of a gender-fair language intervention for stereotype bias Forthcoming in The Leadership Quarterly
- The network cost of motherhood: longitudinal and qualitative evidence on gendered resource depletion Working paper
- Distorted mirrors: the gap between AI images of leaders and leader identity prototypes Working paper
- Third-party bias and gender in sponsorship decisions Working paper
Get in touch
Book an introductory call
Thirty minutes, no charge. Tell me what you are trying to understand about your organisation, or what you want an audience to walk away with, and I will tell you how I can help.
Email me a few times that suit you and I will confirm one.