Creating clarity from complexity, while bringing people along with you.
Sometimes the challenge isn’t knowing that something needs to change. It’s working out how to make it happen.
You might be building something that doesn’t exist yet. Preparing a team for significant change. Stepping into greater leadership responsibility. Or trying to connect people, priorities and ways of working that have become disconnected.
I’m drawn to situations where there isn’t an obvious playbook, something needs to be built or changed, and progress depends as much on people as it does on having a good idea.
Hi, I’m Lara Meyer
My career has taken me across research and insight, business building, strategy, leadership, coaching and facilitation, working across different organisations, industries and countries.
On paper, that can look like a varied career. In practice, I keep finding myself drawn to a similar kind of challenge: making sense of something messy, working out what needs to happen next, and helping turn it into something that works.
Sometimes that has meant building a new function or proposition from the ground up. Sometimes it has meant helping a team develop the capability and confidence to work differently. Sometimes it has meant working with a leader navigating greater responsibility or significant change.
The context changes. The underlying work is often surprisingly similar.
Where I can make a difference
Building something new
You’ve been asked to create a new function, proposition or capability, but there isn’t an established model to inherit.
The destination may not yet be completely clear. Priorities need defining, stakeholders need bringing together, and enough structure needs creating to turn an idea into something that can actually work.
I particularly enjoy this stage: making sense of what’s needed, building the foundations and helping something move from an idea or scrappy beginning towards a credible, sustainable capability.
Leading through change
Your organisation is changing and your team needs to change with it.
Perhaps the strategy has shifted, a major transformation is coming, or existing structures and ways of working are no longer enough. The challenge isn’t simply communicating the change. People need to understand what it means for them, reconnect around a direction and develop the capability to operate differently.
This is where strategy, facilitation and people development come together: translating change into something people can understand, contribute to and ultimately make real.
Stepping into bigger leadership
You’re taking on greater responsibility, leading across new boundaries or being asked to operate differently from before.
The answers are rarely as simple as learning another leadership technique. You may need to rethink how you influence, make decisions, work through others, navigate complexity or show up when the stakes are higher.
Coaching creates space to step outside the day-to-day, understand what the new context is asking of you and experiment with how you want to lead within it.
Different challenges. A common thread.
Whether I’m building a new capability, facilitating a team through change or coaching a leader, I tend to come back to the same questions:
What is really happening here? What are we trying to achieve? What is getting in the way? What needs to be built or changed? And how do we bring people with us?
My approach draws on more than 20 years working across research, strategy, business building and leadership, alongside my experience as an ICF Professional Certified Coach and facilitator.
I’m interested in both sides of the equation: the structures, decisions and systems that make progress possible, and the people who ultimately have to make them work.
Ideas I’m exploring
I write about the questions that emerge from this work: building when there isn’t a playbook, leading through complexity, what happens as organisations grow, the connections between people and systems, and what different contexts can reveal about how we work.
I’m less interested in presenting finished answers than in exploring useful questions, sharing what I’m noticing and putting ideas into conversation with other people.
Speaking & conversations
Some ideas get better when you talk about them.
I speak, facilitate and join conversations about leadership, organisational culture, change, growth, resilience and the conditions that help people and organisations perform.
Connect
If something here connects with a challenge you’re working through, an idea you’re exploring or a conversation you think I should be part of, I’d be glad to hear from you.