Who We Are

Ali is The Scute’s coaching lead. She spent the first part of her career in HR consulting and executive search before retraining as a coach in 2016.

She's an ICF PCC coach, holds a postgraduate certificate in business and personal coaching, and works as a coach, team and group coach, coach mentor and supervisor.

Ali's brilliant at spotting the apparently helpful leadership habits that quietly stop other people thinking. Her style is warm, practical and direct. She cares about coaching being set up properly and linked to something that matters — not offered as an expensive sticking plaster.

Away from work, she can usually be found with Grub, her standard schnauzer, or singing and playing keyboards with her country band. Wine occasionally appears in both stories

Karen is The Scute’s people-strategy and consultancy lead. She has worked across coaching, leadership, HR and people strategy for more than 30 years, including as a fractional Chief People Officer.

She's an executive coach and EMCC Senior Practitioner, with an MSc in Positive Psychology and Coaching Psychology. She's interested in the systems around people: what gets rewarded, where decisions sit, what managers are carrying and why an organisation can say one thing while teaching people to do another.

Karen is sometimes described as Hermione Granger, mostly because she will happily research something to death and then organise it into a useful spreadsheet. She's also The Scute’s unofficial Chief Baking and Cheffing Officer. Clients tend not to object.

Scutes are the small plates that make up a turtle's shell.  As a turtle grows, individual scutes shed and renew rather than the whole shell being thrown away.

That felt like a good picture of useful change: keep what's working, shed what's not and make room to grow.

We mention this after explaining what we do because nobody should have to complete a turtle-based riddle before deciding whether a consultancy is relevant.