Dr Dena Michelli

Dena works with individuals who have aspirations to improve their communication skills, increase their leadership effectiveness and to plan their careers. She began her professional life as a mechanical engineer in the automotive industry. However, as a result of furthering her education as a mature student, she developed a passion for adult learning and, after several years, decided to expand this interest further in the context of leadership development. Her subsequent career step took her to the Institute of Management, a professional body, where she took responsibility for the senior executive development of members.

Deciding to work internationally, Dena left to join a prominent global Business School as Business Development Director for Executive Education. This took her travelling across the world and gave her direct exposure to many of the business issues facing large, multinational organisations. It was here, too, that she built her experience as a programme director and coach, taking responsibility for the flagship senior executive programme. After leaving this establishment, Dena became a full-time consultant with a boutique consulting firm specialising in the identification, development and deployment of senior executive talent. She became independent in 2002 to create time to finish her PhD studies.

Since this time, she has worked with many international organisations and business schools, most specifically, IMD, where she has coached on the academic, open and company specific programmes. She has joint responsibility for running the coaching pool for the EMBA programme and for calibrating the leadership essays to ensure academic rigor across the classes and the cohorts. Dena’s clients come from a wide band of business sectors including Partners in the Professional Services as well as Board level and senior leaders in publicly quoted and private companies, government agencies, NGOs and charities.

Dena is an accredited user of the Hogan suite of instruments – HDS, HPI and MVPI, Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), NEO PI-R, Work Interests Survey (WIS), Belbin, the Profiler 360-degree survey instrument and Personal Directions, Management Research Groups as well as being an experienced user of MTS 360-degree survey instrument. She is also accredited by the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) at EIA Senior Practitioner and receives regular supervision on her practice.

She completed her MSc in Human Resource Development at Lancaster University in 1996 and her PhD on 'Transformative learning' at the University of Surrey in 2004. Dena has authored, co-authored or contributed to many books on topics that help to build personal effectiveness, including The Assertiveness Workbook (2013) and The Beating Shyness Workbook (2014)

In her spare time, Dena likes to make stained glass windows in the medieval style and, in 2012, graduated with an MA in Architectural Glass from Swansea Metropolitan University.