Meet Heidi · Executive Coach & Townsend Leadership Program Director
I Help Leaders with All the Hard Parts of Leadership
Meet Heidi · Executive Coach & Townsend Leadership Program Director
I Help Leaders with All the Hard Parts of Leadership
I’m Heidi Sadecky. I coach leaders across Pittsburgh and the Northeast, and I’m the only Townsend Leadership Program director in the region.
Most of the leaders I work with arrive able to name the thing. Sometimes it’s an obstacle, like a conversation they need to have, or a team that runs through them instead of beside them, or a habit they’ve started to notice isn’t serving them.
Sometimes it’s a vision, like a role they want but don’t know how to prepare for, or a team they want to build, or a target they need to hit with a secret sauce they have yet to find.
When you can point to what’s gotten hard, or what’s out of reach, and you’ve decided you’re done accepting the status quo, that is exactly when our work together can begin.
I have spent more than thirty years in rooms like the one you are sitting in. What that gives you is not just a resume. It is a coach who has seen your situation before, and knows the tools that deliver the fix.
What We Work On in All Our Leadership Development Programs
The specifics change with every person, but at a senior level the work tends to gather around a few things:
- Communication that scales. Being articulate one-on-one is the easy part. The harder skill is landing a message cleanly across a division of hundreds, holding your footing in a board meeting, or saying the difficult thing in public without lighting a fire you then have to manage.
- A steady internal compass. The decisions that you have to make are often the ones with no clean answer, which is why they’re on your desk. We build the self-knowledge and conviction to make those calls under pressure, and to hold them when the second-guessing starts, from the market, the board, or the voice in your own head.
- Developing the bench, and trusting it. Past a certain altitude, your job is no longer the work; it is the people who do the work. We focus on developing the leaders beneath you, handing off what you have outgrown, and resisting the constant pull to take it all back.
- Presence when the stakes are highest. The all-hands after a brutal quarter. The negotiation. The crisis the whole company is watching you absorb. How you carry yourself in those rooms sets the temperature for everyone else.
- Boundaries that protect your judgment. At the top, everyone and everything has a claim on your time and attention. We work on the lines that keep the urgent from crowding out the important, and keep you from quietly becoming the bottleneck in your own organization.
Results I’ve Helped Leaders Reach
Over more than thirty years, I have helped executives, founders, and senior leaders:
- Win back the trust of a team that had stopped telling them the truth, so problems could surface while they were still small enough to solve
- Stop carrying underperformers whose work had been dragging entire initiatives into mediocrity
- Break through a plateau they had hit but could not name, after years of being told they were doing just fine
- Lead through a reorganization, or a run of resignations, without losing the people they could least afford to lose
- Make the call no one else could make, and hold it steady when the board, the market, or their own doubt pushed back
- Return to the work as a whole person instead of a depleted one, with their evenings and their judgment both intact
Emotional Intelligence Is a Leadership Skill, Not a Soft One
Emotional intelligence is a misunderstood term. People hear it and picture a soft skill, something you can work on if you have the time, a nice-to-have once the real work is done.
It is none of that. It is the single biggest factor in shaping your working relationships. And since you’re a leader, your working relationships are the single biggest factor shaping the results you deliver. The more senior you are, the more this is true.
Emotional intelligence can be trained like any technical skill. It is a competence, not a personality type, and it’s not a feminine-only skill. It is a powerful tool in the work that leaders do, and in their personal lives too. A great deal of the work I do with leaders incorporates the elements of emotional intelligence.
Often, the traits and habits of an emotionally intelligent leader turn out to be the missing pieces in leaders who head some of the most recognizable organizations in Pittsburgh. They were already successful, accomplished, and respected. But they found themselves at plateaus. We broke through them together.
About the Townsend Leadership Program (TLP)
TLP produces leaders who command both respect and results. Its principles are foundational to my coaching style.
I’ve found that TLP is more well-known in some parts of the country than others. Here on the east coast where my practice is, it doesn’t have quite as much brand recognition. So I’ll take a bit of space here to tell you about it.
The Townsend Leadership Program was built by Dr. John Townsend, a psychologist, leadership coach and author, and founder of the Townsend Leadership Institute. TLP has a straightforward premise: leaders develop best in a small, committed group of peers that pairs skill-building with candid input over time, not in one weekend. You can learn more about TLP on Dr. Townsend’s website.
Dr. Townsend does the work of developing leaders on the west coast, where he lives. In bringing his program nationwide, he selects and trains coaches through a competitive application and training process.
I’m proud to say that I am the only certified Townsend Leadership Program Director in the state of Pennsylvania, and to date, in the entire Northeast U.S. I don’t say this for applause, but to emphasize that if the program resonates with you, and you’re here in Pennsylvania or any of its eastward neighbors, we should talk.
My Executive Coaching Credentials and Certifications
I hold a master’s degree in Organizational Leadership and a set of certifications I use in my work:
- Townsend Leadership Program Director, hand-selected and trained by Dr. John Townsend
- ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and Certified Advanced Executive Coach
- Gallup-Certified CliftonStrengths Coach
- Certified in the Working Genius
- EQ-i 2.0 and EQ360, for emotional intelligence
- Conversational Intelligence
- Conflict Dynamics
- TPRAT
- ECHO
- Lean Six Sigma Green Belt
Honored with the 2021 Influential Leadership Award from Pittsburgh Professional Women, and a featured speaker at the John Maxwell Live2Lead conference. My work spans retail, healthcare, financial services, energy, and logistics.
The Person Behind the Coaching
Heidi Sadecky:
What I believe about leadership fits in a sentence:
“By focusing on healthy relationships, accountability, the willingness to change, and leadership with a purpose, we can become more effective leaders and humans.”
My husband Chris and I live in the South Hills of Pittsburgh with our golden retriever, Willy. We are active in our church, where I teach elementary students. On as many weekends as I can, I’m at a local riding academy called Horse N Soul, where I help care for a blind horse named Knobby. I like to travel (Iceland and Alaska were recent favorites), and I raise monarch butterflies, which is every bit as odd and wonderful as it sounds. I also like to read, so I’m definitely a person who finds enjoyment in life’s quieter moments.