Elevating Leadership.
Strengthening Teams.
I partner with leaders and leadership teams at every level—from rising leaders to senior executives—to cultivate executive presence and build trust and collaboration, creating the foundation for greater performance and impact.
About Shabnam
Leadership is personal.
So is meaningful growth.
With more than 25 years in organizational and talent development, I have helped leaders and teams navigate change, strengthen relationships, and achieve lasting results.
My experience spans large organizations across financial services, real estate, retail, and professional services. I have partnered with executives, emerging leaders, and teams on leadership development, executive presence, high-performing teams, change management, and organizational effectiveness.
Today, I bring that experience to my independent practice, partnering directly with executives and leadership teams to address the challenges that matter most. I believe sustainable growth comes through reflection, honest dialogue, new perspectives, and purposeful action. Guided by this belief, I take a thoughtful, practical and personalized approach to my work, bringing curiosity and genuine commitment to helping each client achieve their goals.
Fluent in three languages and shaped by Persian and French literary traditions, I bring a blend of old-world wisdom and contemporary thinking to my work with leaders and teams.
Because no two leaders or teams are alike, I tailor each engagement to who you are, what you value, and what matters most, creating a path toward meaningful, sustainable growth and impact.
My Approach
Collaborative. Grounded. Real.
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A True Partnership
This isn't a program delivered to you. It's work we do together. You bring your context, challenges, experiences, and goals; I bring structure, perspective, experience, and honest feedback. Together, we explore, question, examine, and discover what is most useful, considering different possibilities and alternatives along the way. The direction takes shape collaboratively, adapting to what we learn and what will be most effective.
Grounded in What Matters
Development has to make a difference in the real world. We consider the demands of your role, the relationships you navigate, the culture around you, and the realities of your organization. We draw on your own experiences and perceptions, as well as feedback from people who work with you, to better understand what is working well and what could be improved. Rather than applying a predetermined model of effective leadership, we work together to identify the most meaningful opportunities for growth and tailor our approach to what will make the greatest difference in your particular context.
Shaped by Experience
I bring more than professional expertise to this work. I've navigated significant change and uncertainty firsthand, both personally and while leading organizations through mergers, acquisitions, and periods of transformation. That experience shapes how I work with leaders: practical, grounded, and attuned to what change actually asks of people. That's also why I care that insight translates into real behavior, not just conversation.
Services
Personalized coaching, workshops, and consulting designed around your goals, challenges, and context.
Individual Coaching
One-on-one coaching for executives and leaders grounded in self-awareness, situational awareness, and emotional intelligence, with a focus on achieving greater effectiveness, and impact.
Executive Presence Development
A personalized experience designed to help leaders elevate their presence, expand their influence, and create greater impact through how they lead and connect with others.
Leadership Development
Customized workshops that build the capabilities needed to lead with greater clarity, confidence, emotional intelligence, and inclusivity.
Team Building &
Alignment
Facilitated experiences that build trust, collaboration, communication, and alignment, helping teams work more effectively together.
Communication &
Public Speaking
Coaching to help leaders communicate with clarity and concision, engage their audience, and deliver messages with greater confidence and influence, whether in meetings, presentations, or high-stakes conversations.
Change & Conflict Navigation
Practical guidance for navigating organizational change, difficult conversations, competing perspectives, and conflict with greater clarity and effectiveness.
Assessments & Behavioral Insights
Behavioral and 360-degree assessments that provide deeper insight into individual and team dynamics and inform meaningful opportunities for growth.
A Closer Look
Individual Coaching
A personalized coaching experience designed around who you are, what you want to achieve, and how you want to grow as a leader.
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Starting Point
Our first conversation focuses on clarifying your values, strengths, goals, aspirations, challenges, experiences, and current context. Together, we identify one or two priorities to focus the coaching on and establish a clear direction for our work.
Self Awareness & Insight
Through reflection and thoughtful dialogue, you develop a deeper awareness and understanding of yourself as a leader, including your perspectives, behavioral patterns, and the impact you have on others. This can reveal new insights and possibilities for growth.
Development Priorities
You identify one or two areas of development that you want to focus on and examine what may be getting in the way. You choose which strengths to leverage, when to dial them up or down, and which behaviors or "muscles" to develop. Together, we clarify the specific behaviors you want to practice.
Application & Feedback
You apply the behaviors you have chosen in real leadership situations and bring your experiences back to our coaching conversations. We reflect on what happened, what worked, and what you might approach differently. Through thoughtful, actionable feedback, you refine your approach, strengthen new behaviors, and continue putting them into practice.
Accountability & Growth
You reflect on your progress, recognize what is changing, and take ownership of continuing to apply what you have learned. We build accountability around the behaviors you want to sustain, fine-tune your approach as needed, and identify opportunities for continued growth, including areas of development you may want to explore next.
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We don't learn from experience; we learn from reflecting on experience.
— inspired by John Dewey
360 Assessment & Reflection
You begin by completing a 360-degree assessment and reviewing resources designed to help you understand your results. You take time to analyze your feedback, reflect on what resonates, and consider what you want to explore further.
Individual Insight & Context
In our one-on-one conversation, we examine your feedback through the lens of your leadership role, relationships, and business context. We share insights, identify strengths and opportunities, and explore how your leadership presence is experienced by others.
Together, we narrow the focus to one or two areas where targeted development can make the greatest difference. We consider how to leverage your strengths and address specific development needs.
From Insight to Action
Together, we translate your feedback into practical actions designed to expand your executive presence. Rather than simply identifying areas for development, we determine what you can do differently, where, when, and how to apply it.
Following our conversation, I provide practical articles, resources, and links selected to reinforce the learning and inspire you to put it into practice.
Executive Presence Development
A personalized experience designed to help leaders elevate their presence, expand their influence, and create greater impact through how they lead and connect with others.
Executive Presence Development is designed for leaders at all levels, with particular relevance for senior and executive leaders whose presence, communication, and influence have a significant impact on others. The experience begins with the Bates ExPI™, a 360-degree assessment developed by Bates Communications, now part of BTS, and focuses on closing the gap between how you intend to show up and how your presence is experienced by those around you.
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Two Paths for Continued Development
When multiple leaders participate in the program, the organization can choose how to continue building executive presence across the leadership team in a way that aligns with its goals, culture, and context.
Cohort Workshop
A facilitated group experience where leaders learn the Bates Executive Presence model, including its dimensions and qualities, deepen their understanding of their own strengths and opportunities, and learn through discussion, practice, and peer feedback.
The workshop can be customized in length and content and delivered virtually or in person.
The shared experience creates common language around executive presence, encourages leaders to learn from and support one another, and can strengthen connection and alignment across the leadership team.
Executive Presence is not a mystery. It is a collection of qualities and behaviors that can be observed, measured, developed, and applied with intention.
Individual Executive Presence Coaching
A series of one-on-one coaching sessions allows leaders to deepen their understanding of the Bates Executive Presence model and continue developing the areas identified through their 360 feedback.
Coaching provides a confidential space to work through real leadership situations, experiment with different approaches, and reflect on what is working and what could be more effective. Guidance and feedback are tailored to the leader and the realities of their role.
Over time, leaders learn to leverage and regulate their strengths, develop new behaviors, and become more intentional about how they show up, communicate, and influence others.
Assessments & Behavioral Insights
The right assessment can surface insights that are difficult to see on our own, creating greater self-awareness and a foundation for meaningful growth.
I carefully select assessments to help individuals and teams better understand their strengths, how they show up in their interactions, and how they are experienced by the people they work with. Depending on the goals and context of the work, an assessment may be used to reveal behavioral patterns, communication styles, interpersonal dynamics, or motivations.
Bates ExPI™*
The Executive Presence Index (Bates ExPI™), developed by Bates Communications, now part of BTS, is a validated, reliable 360-degree assessment that provides a comprehensive view of how a leader's executive presence is perceived by others. Based on three dimensions of Character, Substance, and Style, with five factors under each, it examines 90 leadership behaviors and compares a leader's self-perception with feedback from managers, peers, direct reports, and others.
The results reveal areas of alignment and differences in perception, helping identify strengths and opportunities for growth.
The Bates ExPI™ serves as the foundation of the Executive Presence Development program, where assessment insights are translated into focused development and practical action.
Bates LTPI™*
The Bates Leadership Team Performance Index (Bates LTPI™), developed by Bates Communications, now part of BTS, is a multi-rater assessment designed to help leadership teams understand the dynamics that shape their performance. Based on three dimensions of Culture, Credibility, and Collaboration, with five factors under each, it provides a comprehensive view of how team members experience their collective effectiveness.
Beyond average scores, the assessment reveals the range of perspectives across the team, highlighting where team members agree and where they experience the team and its effectiveness differently.
The results are summarized in a report and explored together in a facilitated team debrief that encourages open dialogue and thoughtful reflection. We go beyond reviewing the results to clarify the team's purpose, shared goals, and levels of interdependence. Some teams may need to coexist effectively, while others need to cooperate, collaborate, or co-create. The goal is not to impose a one-size-fits-all level of collaboration, but to identify the level of partnership that enables the team to perform at its best.
Drawing on their collective wisdom, team members identify their priorities and develop a practical action plan, clarifying who will do what and by when to take their team performance to the next level.
bMaps
The bMaps Instrument is a validated psychometric assessment that helps individuals and teams understand their behavioral preferences and how they influence conversations and interactions. It provides both individual and team profiles, revealing patterns in how people communicate, respond to others, and approach everyday and high-stakes situations.
By making these patterns visible, bMaps helps individuals and teams recognize where their habitual behaviors may limit effectiveness and where different approaches could lead to better outcomes. It provides a shared, neutral language for understanding behavioral differences and navigating challenging interactions.
The goal is to expand behavioral flexibility, moving beyond default responses and developing greater choice in how we communicate and interact. With greater awareness and a broader range of ways to respond, individuals and teams can adapt more intentionally, improve the quality of their interactions, and build more effective relationships.
CliftonStrengths®
CliftonStrengths® is a strengths-based assessment that identifies an individual's natural patterns of thought, feeling and behavior across 34 talent themes. Rather than measuring performance or ability, it provides insight into the talents that come most naturally to each person. It creates a foundation for developing those talents into strengths through knowledge, skill, and intentional practice.
The assessment helps individuals recognize where they are most naturally inclined to contribute, how to leverage those talents more intentionally, and where strengths may become overused or less effective. In one-on-one coaching, we explore the individual's top five talent themes and translate the insights into practical opportunities for development and application.
For teams, CliftonStrengths® provides a powerful lens for understanding the collective strengths of the group. A team debrief explores how strengths are distributed across the four domains of Executing, Influencing, Relationship Building, and Strategic Thinking. This highlights areas of concentration, gaps, and complementary capabilities, helping team members better understand what they bring to the team, where they may need to draw on one another, and how to leverage collective strengths more intentionally.
SDI®
The Strength Deployment Inventory® (SDI®) is a psychometric assessment that explores personal motives, conflict behaviors, and relationship dynamics. Rooted in Relationship Awareness Theory, it helps individuals and teams look beyond personality traits alone and understand what drives their behavior, how those motivations shape their interactions, and how they may respond differently when conflict arises.
SDI® examines both what we do and why we do it, providing insight into our Motivational Value System, everyday strengths, and overdone strengths. It also reveals how our motives and behaviors can shift through the stages of conflict, helping individuals recognize patterns that may strengthen or hinder relationships.
In a team debrief, participants explore their own and their colleagues' motivational patterns, strengths, and conflict triggers, creating a shared language for understanding differences and navigating challenging interactions. The goal is not to change who we are, but to create greater choice in how we use our strengths, communicate, and navigate conflict, leading to more productive interactions, stronger relationships, and more effective teamwork.
I may also incorporate additional assessments, such as MBTI® and FIRO-B®, when appropriate, selecting the tools that best fit what you're looking to accomplish and where they can provide the greatest insight.
* The Bates ExPI™ and Bates LTPI™ assessments and their underlying models are proprietary to BTS USA, Inc. Shabnam Vaziri-Sadri is a Certified Practitioner of the Bates ExPI™ and Bates LTPI™ and offers coaching and consulting services through her independent practice.
Let's Talk
Every leadership challenge, team, and organization is different. That's why I start with a conversation.
Tell me what you are looking to accomplish, what challenges or opportunities you're facing, and what you would like to be different. Our first conversation will help us clarify what matters most, where you can make a difference, and how I can help you move forward.
Our first 30-minute conversation is complimentary. From there, we'll shape the scope and format together, whether that's a single session or an ongoing partnership. Let's get started.