Chyonne helps leaders and organisations to navigate complexity with presence, perspective and purpose, supporting them to lead with clarity in times of uncertainty.
After more than a decade as a lawyer, Chyonne followed her passion for developing people into the field of leadership development and executive coaching. She leverages her analytical skills and depth of experience in complex transactions to help leaders tackle complex challenges across a range of diverse industries including construction, information technology, banking and financial services, health, mining, professional services, transport, government, and higher education. Her experience includes:

Leadership Development: facilitating numerous intensive leadership development programs with a particular focus on building high performing teams (psychological safety, trust, collaboration, feedback, leveraging cognitive diversity) and navigating change (influencing, stakeholder engagement, storytelling, collaborative problem-solving), including as Program Director for a recent Executive Leadership Development Program in the rail industry.

Complex Communication: delivering hundreds of workshops in negotiation, influencing, and conflict resolution across Australia, New Zealand and Asia, as well as academic programs at Monash University (undergraduate and postgraduate) and Melbourne Business School’s short course in Negotiation & Conflict resolution.

Executive Coaching: working one-on-one with senior leaders to increase their leadership presence and confidence, enhance team engagement and performance, and cultivate focus and resilience, as well as coaching mid-career professionals on their career development and influencing skills.

Industry Experience: providing complex legal advice to state, statutory, and local government authorities, and negotiating contracts and disputes in the context of major infrastructure projects across the water, gas, electricity, renewable energy, and transport sectors.

Chyonne’s current area of focus is supporting leaders to cultivate more inclusive, psychologically safe cultures that inspire high performance without sacrificing wellbeing. Clients describe her as calm, curious and creative, with a knack for cultivating safe spaces for tough issues to be explored openly and constructively.

James has spent over two decades in senior management roles with large national and internal organisations. His most recent senior executive role was General Manager Executive Education at Melbourne School.

James has assisted organisations develop more purposeful and confident leaders. James effectively brings together leading-edge executive education design and delivery with deep understanding of organisational needs and challenges. He brings an extremely diverse corporate background having worked in a wide variety of roles and industries, from Mining Engineer to General Manager. This diverse background brings new insights for clients as well as a very pragmatic, business output driven approach in his work.

James has a particular interest in the areas of leadership development, group dynamics, culture change and the application of emotional and behavioural intelligence in the workplace. As a facilitator, James utilises experiential learning methods to create powerful development experiences. Through the application of deep facilitation techniques, James surfaces the unconscious dynamics that exist enabling individuals and groups to build the capacity for greater leadership effectiveness. Whilst working in senior executive roles James completed a Masters in Organisational Dynamics, which allows him to draw on a vast body of contemporary research and apply this to clients’ real world organisational challenges.

As an executive coach, James brings together a vast body of coaching knowledge and practice combined with a deep understanding and reading of organisational realities and challenges. He sees the role of the coach as ‘holding up the mirror’ so that clients build increased self-awareness and take on new perspectives. James has coached CEOs and senior leaders across more than 15 countries including Australia and Asia Pacific.

Prior to joining MBS, James worked in several diverse roles including Program Director Leadership Development AXA Asia Pacific. Based in Singapore, he was responsible for the establishment of AXA’s Asia Pacific University Campus. James has also worked as a Principal Consultant for PricewaterhouseCoopers, as a Mining Engineer with Rio Tinto and founded his own leadership development consultancy. Such diverse experience translates into powerful new insights and perspectives for clients.

Tom thrives in leading organisations through transition as an established Chair, Director, Executive and Advisor in listed and unlisted organisations leveraging his global expertise in business turnaround and project development. His authentic approach builds executive strength to underpin rapid and sustainable growth with accountable and inclusive cultures for startups, merger/acquisitions and growth projects.

Building transitions is the basis of Tom’s portfolio of roles with organisations focused on infrastructure, industrial, energy and social services sectors. Tom draws on his successful executive career as a global multi $billion business and project leader in the services sector across Australia, New Zealand, Asia, and North America in global companies as a Managing Director, Chief Executive Officer and Group Vice President, Project Executive in phases of growth, turnaround and merger and acquisition.

Tom’s exceptionally broad experience in many countries and cultures is typified by turnarounds that grew from a low base to significant businesses. This experience has enabled Tom’s rapid transition to a successful Chair and Director of listed and unlisted companies.


From 2010 to 2013 Tom was named as one of the top 100 engineers in Australia by Engineers Australia.