David Yau
David is an executive coach and facilitator who supports individuals and senior teams to navigate complex workplace challenges, including leadership transitions, career development, and difficult relationships. Drawing on a combination of banking experience and psychological frameworks, he helps clients deepen self-awareness, shift unhelpful patterns, and achieve meaningful, sustainable change.
His coaching is grounded in the belief that real progress comes from working through live challenges while increasing awareness of thinking and behavioural patterns. He creates a space that is both supportive and appropriately challenging, enabling clients to slow down, reflect, and explore new ways of thinking and acting. His aim is to help individuals and teams develop deeper understanding, strengthen relationships, and make tangible progress on what matters most.
David combines coaching and facilitation to help clients address real-time leadership and organisational challenges. His work is informed by a range of established frameworks, including Strengths-based practice, Action Reflection Learning (ARL), Adaptive Leadership, Immunity to Change, and Systems Psychodynamics. Clients can expect a reflective, experiential process that encourages experimentation, builds insight, and leads to practical, sustainable shifts in behaviour and decision-making.
He works with both individuals and leadership teams across the private and public sectors. His clients include corporate organisations spanning financial services, luxury brands, and high-tech industries, as well as international public-sector organisations, particularly in Europe and Asia.
David is a banker-turned-coach with over 20 years of experience at HSBC and Standard Chartered Bank, where he worked as both a corporate banker and an in-house leadership development practitioner.
He holds an MBA from INSEAD and an Economics degree from the University of Hong Kong, alongside a postgraduate certificate in Systemic Family Psychotherapy and an executive coaching qualification from Tavistock. He is certified in multiple psychometric tools including Hogan, MBTI, DiSC, Facet5, StrengthsFinder, and FIRO-B.
“David has the touch. He led me to deal with the important not with what I thought it was important. I cannot but recommend him. He has the tools, resources and empathy to help you. He is not self-imposing, does tiptoe very gently on push-pull and make you reflect, think and most importantly, act.”
“We needed better mutual personal understanding in the team and David delivered it. He helped us park the urge ‘to produce something’ like in meetings. Instead, he gently guided the team to exchange personal stories and feedback to each other.”
“David coached me at a critical point in my career - as I took up my new role as the President amid the rather chaotic 2020 with challenges like COVID. David created a safe yet challenging space which I could slow down to reflect on my team, my environment and most importantly myself.’”
“I invited David to help my team work better together. His work exceeded my expectation in every respect. He coached us very tactfully to have difficult but necessary conversations. I am particularly impressed how he adapted his process to the on-going conversation and environment during our off site - to great effect! My top team has since then gained better trust and implemented quite a few tangible changes well.”