Fiona Siseman

Expert Bio

Being an effective leader is rooted in being authentic, self-aware, and inclusive. The journey to effective leadership is different for everyone and it’s unlocked through experience and self-discovery. I love to help people find and define their own path. I offer 1:1 coaching sessions for leaders in tech that will help you: - reframe your thinking about situations you are finding challenging at work - diagnose what might be going on in your team - support you in how to facilitate workshops or group dynamics - prepare you to have a difficult conversation - be more sure of yourself as a leader. I have a broad background that includes coaching high-performing leadership teams at Spotify, managing people, moving countries (Australia to the USA), and starting my own business. I also experience chronic pain and ADHD. I began my career in operations and delivery roles with Lonely Planet. It was here that I honed my systems thinking and people-first leadership skills as I built effective teams, managed digital projects, and discovered the joy of helping people and teams connect and work effectively together. After a stint at Luna Tractor helping teams with agile transformations I moved across the world from Australia to the US – a jump into the unknown! It was at Spotify that I found my love of enabling and growing leaders. I saw how the power of a well-placed question or observation could unlock a team. I managed coaches and engineering managers, facilitated the right conversations, and built a high-performing senior leadership team in a large Platform Engineering organization (for a period, leading a cross-functional organization of 130 people). Through this work I gained the skills and experience in coaching leaders and teams to be effective, resilient, and adaptable in an environment of fast-paced growth and change. The through-line of my approach is to be endlessly curious about how and why things are. What is driving this behavior? Why is this thing hard to say? What purpose does this have? How can we work with this to get the outcome that we want? Helping people disentangle themselves from beliefs and assumptions to connect to the heart of the matter brings me joy.