Ichi*
Self-Awareness, one of the key themes of my consulting and coaching work with clients, demonstrated by telling My Story
Published in June 2022 by Susann Naomi Israel
Myself in a nutshell
I started Naomi Israel Consulting (Ni*) in spring 2022. The 22 years prior, I served passionately as senior leader in change and transformation within financial services, heading teams up to 50 employees. I worked for Deutsche Bank, UBS, and Credit Suisse, geographically moving from Germany to Singapore to Switzerland. Today, I engage as independent consultant and coach, leveraging my professional experience, cultural heritage, and academic foundation. As mother of two and partner in a patchwork family, I have navigated through numerous, mostly rewarding ups and downs of juggling many parallel priorities related to work, family, and self.
*Ichi is the Japanese word for “one”, so I make a first step today by telling my story without hiding its imperfections. Ni, which I use in my firm’s logo, is the Japanese word for “two”, resembling the client’s decision to take a next step and to embrace organisational development with focus on self and groups.
My service in a nutshell
My consulting and coaching practice targets mid-career leaders with their teams and/or senior executive sponsors. I serve private and corporate clients globally with a focus on key themes, that I feel passionate about from my own professional and cultural experience. These themes address some of the organisational challenges, which complex organisations and leaders acting in them struggle with today, such as genuinely improving gender and culture diversity, addressing transformation anxiety, building strong corporate cultures, enabling sustainable executive development, and engaging in trust-based interaction. My goal is to create and facilitate the safe space for individual executives and their teams to reflect and address these challenges together. Interactions may be event-based, for example group coaching offsites, team workshops, or individual sessions.
My story
24 years after graduating from engineering school as 24-year-old female professional, I am taking what feels like my most important and brave professional leap. In January 2022, I resigned from my 22-year career in the financial services industry. Having worked in Europe and in Asia, I led continuously more strategic assignments, and was entrusted with cross-cultural and cross-functional leadership and transformation management roles. On these grounds, I am excited to establish my own independent consulting and coaching firm.
What made me embark on this path? Coming from a culturally diverse background, Japanese German, and working full-time while simultaneously bringing up my two children as single mother, I have been mindful of an internal struggle between two professional desires: one side of me admittedly wanted stability, economic well-being for my children, and social status, the other side of me aspired entrepreneurship in an area that focuses on people, interaction, and creativity. Efforts reconciling between these two desires within my perceived boundaries – such as changing the employer externally, changing into new roles internally, engaging in new side interests personally – made me realise, how impossible of a mission this was.
I experienced diverse up- and downsides of working in financial services. On the upside, there are working in highly qualified teams and the good compensation. On the downside, it is a long-distant career marathon. Recognised as female and culturally diverse talent, I stepped up from Staff to Associate Director to Director to Executive Director successfully. While passionate about my work, I became increasingly aware, that – likewise myself – too many of my peers across similarly complex organisations were feeling, at heart, that they were not doing something particularly valuable, sustainably impactful, or personally rewarding. The higher my rank and exposure within the organisation, the more political the nature of my work became. Having had no effective coaching and “safe-space” to escape from the dance floor and look at the situation from a balcony perspective, I ran into the danger of acting out in a wrong way.
Today, I see these challenges as opportunity to engage in work that allows me to address today’s organisational challenges in a more meaningful way, supporting the change in organisations from an outside-in perspective. So, I decided, the time for deep change is now.
My personal transformation is a journey. As I allow Self-Awareness to happen, my foggy view on what may come next is gradually clearing up. Revamping my working identity with such a deep change is a rewarding and a demanding explorational personal journey with uncertain outcome. It feels as if the length of my professional roadmap has suddenly expanded dramatically in scope and in reach as independent contributor to change in organisations and improved organisational systems dynamics. I am giving my firm’s start and subsequent growth my best shot, so that private and corporate clients globally may benefit from client-centric interventions, that focus on each individual client’s story.
Read more about my Services and contact [email protected] or go to Contact.