Lorna McDowell (MIICH MMII)

Managing Director / Executive & Life Performance Coach

One of Ireland’s Top 100 Businesswomen (Irish Entrepreneur 2007) and finalist in Image magazine Entrepreneur of the Year 2008, Lorna is an experienced executive coach, learning facilitator, consultant, and coaching supervisor with a background in international corporate communications, branding and organisation culture.

Her strength lies in getting to the heart of the matter fast and creating a highly stimulating reflective environment for collaborative dialogue and strategic and entrepreneurial thinking, whilst helping executives to hone their C-Suite skills in practical steps.

As the founder of Xenergie, Lorna is responsible for designing new programmes and heading up Xenergie’s consulting division, which focuses on talent management, internal communications and organisational culture development, including examining the co-relation and measurement of mental and emotional agility to results. She is also responsible for recruitment and mentoring Xenergie’s network of coaches and facilitators.

Lorna’s breadth of experience and training – from strategic marketing and communications to psychotherapy , hypnotherapy, NLP and ethics - enables her to draw on both a deep knowledge of human behavioural science and her own practical business experience as a business strategist, in order to map learning, behaviours and competences to business goals. It is the breadth of her experience and understanding of human psychology that enables her to take coachees safely to face their own fears and surface blocks that they may not have been aware were holding them back. In her coaching engagements, she generally explores the holistic view of the coachee in order to help them build mental, emotional, physical and spiritual stamina for success and find their personal brand - the 20% golden nugget that will deliver 80% success.

Her areas of expertise include top team coaching and facilitation of leadership ‘reflection’ retreats and world café style dialogue groups, change management and supporting internal coaches through coaching supervision; career transitions, confidence and impact in the boardroom (including executive image review) and helping young talent to develop strategic thinking and entrepreneurial business skills. She also provides facilitation and consulting on culture development, internal communications and ‘inner brand’ workshops, which assess brand impact inside the organisation through employee behaviours, and personal brand retreats, entitled “A Brand Called YOU.”

Throughout a 15 year, career in corporate communications prior to becoming a coach, Lorna was called upon to troubleshoot market challenges, develop new initiatives, and bring diverse cultures together.

 

Her early career began with Uniplex Software, Budget Car Rental, and Tektronix colour print division where she learnt the ropes of international marketing. As European Operations Manager for Brodeur Worldwide, part of the Omnicom group and at the time the world’s largest high tech marketing consultancies servicing companies such as IBM, Cisco, Nortel and BT, Lorna was involved in planning global communications campaigns for clients and driving an international programme of mergers and acquisitions and culture development for the consultancy, whilst as Northern Europe Marketing Director For Plaut International Management Consulting and as VP-Marketing Europe for VC-backed start-up IronsideTechnologies, Lorna directed a complete overhaul of brand and market opportunity. More recently, Lorna has grown her own business, Xenergie Consulting, from scratch since 2001 and is now one of Ireland’s leading executive coaches.

Lorna has been coaching since 2001 and supervising coaches since 2006. She is also on the board of the Irish Coach Development Network, an organisation that is overseeing the aligning of standards for coaching in Ireland working with the various national and international coaching associations, and she is a member of the International Coach Federation working towards her PCC accreditation.

A mother of two children, Lorna lives in Galway, Ireland and has a base in London and Dublin.

Client projects have included some of the world’s largest consulting organisations and multinationals such as Abbott Pharmaceuticals, AIB , Cisco, Dairygold, Johnson & Johnson, GE/SES, SAP and Thyssenkrup, as well as public sector and education including Irish Management Institute, Marketing Institute, CIPD , HSE, Enable Ireland and Irish Rail, and over 300 individual coaching engagements since 2001.

Lorna facilitates programmes worldwide and is a motivational speaker on A Brand Called YOU – Building Brands through People and Leading from the Inside Out.