Sadie Wackett is an executive coach who helps executive women lead from alignment. She is the founder of Sadie Wackett Co., a former global Chief People Officer, and an ICF-credentialed (ACC) executive coach. Her clients are senior women who carry real authority and want to lead without self-abandonment.
Sadie works at the intersection of executive women's leadership and organizational performance. Her one-on-one coaching serves women who are already capable, already accomplished, and carrying significant responsibility. Most are stepping into greater scope, leading through transition, or reaching a point where external success no longer feels like the full answer.
The work starts with the patterns running underneath that capability: over-responsibility that looks like competence, perfectionism that works as protection, waiting for permission, softening authority, carrying the emotional weight of the room, and the belief that value has to be earned through constant output. These patterns formed for good reasons. They helped women belong, advance, and succeed inside systems with narrow ideas about acceptable leadership. Coaching with Sadie means examining which patterns still serve, which have become costly, and what changes when leadership is no longer driven by old conditioning.
On the organizational side, she partners with companies through engagements that strengthen leadership culture, women's leadership development, and executive team performance. These are companies that want to retain and elevate talented women by addressing the internal and systemic dynamics that traditional leadership development leaves untouched.
Her client work includes leaders at Verizon, SpaceX, Liquid I.V., Unilever, and Safran, along with founders and CEOs of private equity portfolio companies.
The practice focuses on professional women because the terrain they navigate is layered, and the constraints they face are not only internal.
Women in leadership operate inside systems that were not designed with them in mind. They are asked to carry performance and perception at the same time: decisive without being harsh, ambitious without being threatening, collaborative without disappearing, resilient without needing too much. Research from LeanIn.Org and McKinsey tracks how these expectations persist at senior levels. They do not fade with seniority. The stakes attached to them increase.
There is also a gap between how capable a woman looks and how much she is holding. Sadie calls this the invisible load: the emotional labor, the unassigned responsibilities, and the habits absorbed over years inside systems that asked more of women and accounted for less. The load is structural, and conventional leadership development rarely names it.
Capable women become the reliable ones. The more they deliver, the more they are trusted. The more they are trusted, the more they are given. The more they are given, the harder it becomes to see where contribution ends and self-abandonment begins. The coaching lives in that space, between external success and internal truth.
It is rooted in agency. It does not ask women to reject ambition, responsibility, excellence, or power. It helps them relate to those things on purpose, so they lead from self-trust instead of survival strategy.
Sadie calls her methodology Applied Self-Leadership: the practice of understanding what drives you internally, then translating that awareness into how you lead, decide, speak, set boundaries, and use your authority.
The method works on two layers. The outer game is what others see: communication, presence, visibility, decision-making, and influence. The inner game is what drives it: identity, beliefs, conditioning, emotional regulation, and the internal narratives that shape behavior under pressure. Most leadership development works on the outer game. Applied Self-Leadership starts with the inner game, because visible success built on internal disconnection does not hold.
The reason is plain. A woman can learn every communication framework available and still hold back in the moment that matters. She can know how to set a boundary and still say yes before checking her own capacity. She can understand the mechanics of executive presence and still feel herself shrink in rooms where power is being negotiated. The shift happens when she can see what is happening underneath.
In practice, self-leadership shapes how women own their visibility, make decisions, protect their energy, hold authority, and navigate power. Sadie walked through the conditioning behind these patterns in a filmed conversation, The Hidden Scripts That Shape You. The method is grounded in neuroscience and psychology and built from two decades inside the rooms where these patterns play out.
Sadie Wackett founded Sadie Wackett Co. as an executive coaching practice for senior women and the organizations that employ them. The firm offers individual coaching and organizational partnerships.
She also serves as an executive coach and consultant with AO People Partners, an executive advisory and leadership development firm based in Bethesda, Maryland.
In 2025, Sadie joined Kelly Berry as co-founder of Life Intended and co-host of its podcast for the Season 2 relaunch. The show explores self-leadership, identity, and emotional wellness for women who want to lead with intention. She also led a four-year women's circle, a small-group container for women doing the inner work behind their leadership.
Sadie writes and speaks on the dynamics facing executive women under pressure: power, identity, authority, energy, and the hidden cost of adaptation. Her perspective is published through the Insights section of her website, where the Lifting the Veil article series examines the patterns she sees most often in senior women: waiting for permission, the over-responsibility trap, the perfectionism shield, and the cost when productivity becomes identity.
Her speaking carries the same themes into rooms of senior leaders. Through her workshops and speaking engagements, she has worked with women at Women in Energy, Women@Safran, Verizon, and Influential Executive Women on confidence, visibility, executive presence, boundaries, and sustainable performance. The Women@Safran employee resource group session was called "Breaking Through Limits." She also joined her AO People Partners colleagues at the Executive CEO Roundtable held at the Salamander Middleburg Resort. Every session pairs the patterns beneath leadership with language and actions participants can use right away.
Before launching her practice, Sadie Wackett spent more than two decades in corporate leadership, starting in operations at L'Oréal before moving into HR. Her corporate career included Director of International Human Resources, Global Human Resources Director, and VP Human Resources roles at Chromalloy between September 2014 and July 2020.
She then served as Executive Vice President Human Resources at Sequa Corporation from July 2020 to November 2022, and Chief Human Resources Officer at Chromalloy from November 2022 to March 2025. Sadie relocated to the US in 2016.
She led the people function through divestitures and a sale, alongside organizational transformation, culture, talent, integration, and expansion across Europe, North America, and Asia. She was often the youngest person and the only woman in the room, and that is where her conviction about self-leadership was formed. She learned it by carrying it herself.
She knows the cost of carrying too much for too long. She knows what it takes to become fluent in other people's expectations, and what it costs to read the room so well that your own voice gets harder to hear. The coaching practice was built from what she learned inside those rooms and inside her own life.
Sadie is a certified executive coach through the Hudson Institute of Coaching and holds the ACC credential from the International Coaching Federation, the recognized global standard for professional coaches. She completed the Advanced Human Resource Executive Program at the University of Michigan's Stephen M. Ross School of Business. She holds a degree in French and European History from the University of Sussex along with a master's in Human Resource Management from the University of Westminster.
Originally from the United Kingdom, she now lives in South Florida with her husband and daughter.
