Dr Dena Michelli

Dena’s experience and speciality centres around helping leaders tap their full potential as they tackle the strategic challenges of today’s complex and ambiguous environment. Not knowing the ‘right’ answer is the first step to creating innovative and tailor-made solutions that will ensure success. It is only through drawing upon the pool of personal resources that formerly unknown and unique responses can be applied, effectively, to situations that have never been encountered before.

Coming from an engineering background and combining logical, analytical, thinking with the creative, generative, approaches learned as a stained-glass artist, Dena finds formerly hidden pathways through which clients can express and apply their talent. She creates an environment in which it is possible to give voice to the thoughts and strategies that have been hitherto censored in the interest of conventional wisdom and current practice, which will not suffice in today’s world. Clients talk of hearing themselves articulate those thoughts that carry a new inventiveness to challenges and problems and the ability to apply these in a way that is impossible to replicate by others.

Dena has passion for the conversation she has with clients and the unexpected emergence of ideas that shape a new future and inform personal growth. She believes that her clients know the answers and that her role is to help them unearth them. The conversations she has with her clients enables them to identify, and believe in, their distinctiveness; their personal blueprint, as they make their way through career transitions and professional transformations.

Although the conversations carry the most powerful force, Dena is also 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 as a Senior Practitioner by the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC).

In recognition of her academic qualifications (She holds an MSc in Human Resource Development from Lancaster University and a PhD on 'Transformative learning' from the University of Surrey) Dena often works on behalf of University Business Schools where the conceptual approach is rigorous and the thinking outcomes are notable. In these environments, Dena has worked across all sectors, including The Professions, Government bodies, Charities and the corporate world. She also has a network of private clients.

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.