Paula Flynn is internationally renowned as The Alchemist of Teams.  She has an uncanny ability to free collaborative genius, enabling teams and groups to achieve truly transformational results.  She has achieved tremendous success with Boards of Management, executive teams, line functions, strategic teams and alliances in the world's highest profile organisations.  Her reputation as an incisive, high impact consultant, facilitator and coach has resulted in organisations using her expertise across diverse industries in every continent across the globe.   

Paula's distinctive approach enables teams to embrace dissonance, transform conflict, shift mindsets as well as generate the synergy to coalesce around compelling purpose.  Her unique expertise has generated enormous value not only in typical contexts but in situations where collaboration is perceived of as impossible. 

She has a huge track record in building leadership capability in complex systems and is renowned for her talent in coaching leaders to shape  high performance team cultures.  This approach sees leaders modeling a coaching orientation across multiple contexts to accelerate team performance, deepen employee engagement, unleash discretionary effort, build collaborative capability and drive superior value.    

Paula holds an honours degree in education and a master’s degree in educational leadership.  She is accredited in numerous coaching and team diagnostics, CCL, Barrett and Hogan suites, Leadesrhip Circle. MBTI, and Human Synergistics Suite of tools.   Her clients include CEOs, VPs and senior leaders in fortune 500 companies and public sector organisations globally, including  Kraft Foods, Mondelez,, Bacardi, Fonterra, Firmenich, GHD, Clayton Utz, PwC, major hospitals, health insurers and the Department of Health and Human Services.

What Clients say About Paula

'The partners at PwC in Adelaide asked Paula to help facilitate a team building/strategy focus away days.  We worked over a number of months on what we were trying to achieve and co-created an agenda that helped unlock barriers to ensure honest conversations that have helped us to get to the core of what will make us successful tomorrow.  I can not speak highly enough of Paula's facilitation and more importantly as a leadership mentor.'

Jamie Briggs, Managing Partner Adelaide

'Paula has the uniqueness of warmth, empathy and being a quick and a sharp thinker. She is able to create a big impact in the room with different audiences, such as Executives, Senior Leaders and Female Leaders across different cultures. Her strategic, as well as practical view enables deep and insightful discussions about business, culture and coaching with impact. Her depth of experience in coaching, leadership development and nature of people makes her a well listened to person, consultant and coach. She lives and breathes authenticity, sharpness and warmth. I can highly recommend and would work with her anytime together.' 

Rainer Schmitz Director Global Talent Management Bacardi

'We found Paula's insights and experience on how our leaders can coach both profound and transformative.  We gained confidence in how to take opportunities from day to day interactions and more formal processes to coach and encourage our people to be their best.  We know our people's best will be enough provided we encourage them to care, share and dare.  Paula's expert guidance has been important in empowering leaders to provide support to our people on how we can best support them to show respect for our customers, be open about how we make decisions and work in concert with others and can take chances in the interests of the State.  Our leaders very much appreciated the opportunity to practice the Growth Model in small group situations and apply this back in their teams to good effect.  The wider benefits in leader confidence and team performance are starting to merge.  Thanks Paula, for sharing your expertise and insights with us.'

Aidan McGann, Regional Director VicRoads

'Paula has been an outstanding support with my development over the past 4 years.  Under Paula’s mentoring I have a far better understanding of the important of establishing meaningful connections with my team and to engage in conversations that also meet their emotional needs.  At the end of our sessions Paula always leaves me with a number of clear areas of focus and provides the right guidance on how to successfully change my own behaviours and actions.  Paula’s assistance over the past few years has placed me in a very strong position to achieve my careers goals.'

Damian Armour CEO Epworth Hospital Geelong

'Our organization and my team had a long working experience with Paula, her coaching series have contributed significantly to enable our leaders to transform our organization, build a stronger team to pursuit a strong growth agenda. Her authenticity, sharpness and ability to cut through the complexity and touch the core make her a unique and highly valued partner of our leadership team and organization.  She has also been my personal leadership coach where she touched me deeply, supported me to identify internal force and stay true to my purpose, she is not only an excellent working partner, but a true friend!'

Yuan Meng HR Business Lead, Biscuits, Gum & Candy, Sales, Mondelez AP

'I have partnered with Paula over many years, in many businesses and across many countries in the Asia Pacific Region.  Paula brings a collaborative and insightful approach to her work. Her style is natural and inquisitive: she questions and probes to get to the root cause of issues and does so in a respectful and non-threatening manner that transcends culture and hierarchy.  Most of our initiatives have involved facilitating shifts in leadership, organisational culture and business results through a targeted coaching approach starting with teams and boards of management before moving to middle managers and building capability in individual employees. I have found this approach brings alignment and mutual reinforcement which magnifies the impact and end result.'

Katie Hodgson Head of Human Resources Treasury Wines, former head of HR for Axieo and Director of change Culture and Transformation Mondelez

'Throughout my cooperation with Paula she proved to be an extremely valuable business partner and adviser who made a significant input in introducing and establishing coaching in Kraft Foods Russia. Interacting with Paula was always inspiring and stimulating thanks to her unrivalled commitment to understanding the specific needs of our business and her ability to use various communication styles at different levels of the organisation. All in all, this experience proved to be truly transformational and set a scene for cultivating coaching culture in our company. On top of that, we hired Paula to facilitate a workshop for our Leadership team at the point when we had to reinforce our team work and tackle the obstacles to peak performance. Paula did a great job, as always in an energising manner, using a true team coaching approach with a robust mix of support and challenge. No doubt I would highly recommend Paula as a talented coach, facilitator and consultant who is at a forefront of coaching education and can provide learning with a great generosity.'

Karen Grigorian Head of HR Mondelez Russia

'Paula has worked with our organisation for the past 3 years, both with our Executive Management Team and other Senior Leadership Teams.  Paula has tremendous insight into what makes individuals tick through her personal relationship building and profiling tools and how those traits then impact in a team environment.  Paula has been able to improve our ability to align our thinking on key topics, which has had a huge impact on the quality of our decision making as a collective. Paula has an incredible ability to read where we are at as a team and what we need to help us bring our best selves to our work.'

Claire Robbs, CEO Life Without Barriers

'Paula has been a trusted partner of GHD for over a decade. In that time her work with our leaders been transformational. Because of her great talents particularly in the coaching domain we have many leaders who actively listen and ask questions instead of providing answers, who support employees and facilitate their team’s development. Her warm and thoughtful style perfectly challenges our leaders and makes our interactions very easy. I unreservedly recommend Paula as a strategic partner in the development of the leadership pipeline at GHD'

Gerard Noone, Chief Learning Officer GHD Professional Services

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