James Hutton
James works with senior leaders and high-potential individuals, supporting them through periods of transition, complexity, promotion and career progression to enable sustained high performance. He partners with a global client base across major corporates, start-ups, and the charity and not-for-profit sectors.
His coaching is grounded in a strong belief in people and their ability to realise their potential. He creates an informal yet appropriately challenging space where clients can explore multiple perspectives, gain insight and translate this into meaningful change. Operating with openness and without judgement, James helps individuals unlock barriers, strengthen self-awareness and find practical solutions, inspiring them to take action and achieve their goals.
James’ career spans senior talent, development and HR roles across the media, retail and leisure sectors, alongside experience as a consultant designing and delivering leadership development interventions across industries. Most recently, he was Head of Talent and Development at News UK, where he led talent strategy and leadership development and introduced an internal coaching programme that trained over 40 coaches and was featured in Coaching at Work magazine.
He is a recognised thought leader in internal coaching, having spoken at conferences including CIPD and Coaching at Work, sharing his passion for coaching as a driver of personal and organisational development.
James holds a Masters-level postgraduate certificate in Coaching from the University of Sussex and Roffey Park. He is accredited as a Senior Practitioner with the EMCC and receives regular supervision. He is also a qualified NLP Practitioner and is accredited in a range of psychometric tools, including Hogan, MBTI, 16PF and Quintax. He also coaches on the Senior Executive Programme at London Business School.
“James’ coaching had a profound impact on my transition into a more senior role, helping me achieve results more quickly than I would have done alone. He combines calm encouragement with insightful challenge and an excellent sense of when to stretch or support.”
“James has been invaluable to my career development… he helped me make sense of complexity, clarify my goals and reset my priorities. I’ve been able to identify both my strengths and development areas, and move forward with renewed focus and confidence.”
“James is truly insightful. He brings a calmness and reflection to his coaching that is truly engaging and inspiring. His thoughtfulness is empowering and my personal growth developed significantly with his help. I think it is unusual to find someone who is truly balanced like James.”
“Coaching with James far exceeded my expectations, and it had a significant impact on how I handled a stressful return from maternity leave, and a challenging leadership role. James provided the perfect combination of practical advice, calm professionalism and dry sense of humour. James instilled a framework for approaching problems, and a new way of looking at tasks that I have employed at work, and life. I felt we achieved a huge amount in a limited time together, and I'm still learning and building on it now.”
“James an exceptionally good coach, he used a number of techniques to enable me to reflect on my management style to help me develop and introduced me to a number of strategies to deal with situations that were frustrating me. James has helped me to refocus on my career and personal goals and for this, I am very grateful.”
Case Study
“We've had fantastic results from the first programme. Some 70 people have been coached as a result of that, and the feedback has been amazing. People are saying coaching is the best part of their job, even though it's not actually part of it.”