If you are a senior or executive leader, you already know a lot about leadership. You have done the programs. You have the frameworks.

What tends to separate the leaders who have the biggest impact from those who plateau is not more knowledge. It is an honest, accurate picture of who they actually are: their wiring, the gaps between what they say matters and the choices they are actually making, the patterns that are costing them more than they realise. That is the work.

The leaders Gil works with are those she calls future builders. People with both a vision and the commitment to follow through on it. They are not looking for someone to hand them the answers. They want outside thinking alongside them, someone who can see what they already have and tell them the truth about what is getting in the way.

What they consistently find, once they do that work together with Gil, is that they lead with more authority, handle hard conversations without dressing them up or backing away, and make the consequential calls of their role in their own voice, from their own values, without waiting for permission.

Clients say; “She cut through the murkiness and said it the way it is, even the difficult things.” “Whenever I hit a roadblock she was always there with a new method to keep me moving forward.” “It was some of the most productive time I have spent in over 30 years in my profession.”

Gil brings a breadth of context that is hard to manufacture. A decade in corporate HR across South Africa, New Zealand, the UK, and Canada, spanning a family retail business, a boutique IT firm, the National Health Service, and Swiss Re Insurance. She founded Advantage Management Consulting in 2002 and has worked with thousands of leaders since, across the private and public sectors, from emerging leaders to long-standing executives. She is a two-time ICF Prism Award recipient. She rarely needs a client’s world explained to her. She has usually lived close to something like it.

Gil grew up in South Africa, where hard questions about justice and human dignity were dinner table conversation. She watched her parents and their friends grapple with tough issues.  People who held deeply conflicting views with genuine respect for each other, and arrive somewhere better than either of them walked in expecting. That is still what she believes good leadership produces. Not consensus. Something more interesting than that.

Her conviction is that the corporate world can and should be a productive, profitable, life-giving space, and that leaders who know their own wiring are the ones who build it. When leaders stop white-knuckling and get genuinely grounded in who they are, they do not just lead better. They build organizations where other people can do their best work too. That ripple matters to Gil as much as the individual result.

Gil is based out of Kelowna, British Columbia.