Most leaders were never taught to lead. I wasn’t.
I was promoted because I was good at something else. Then I was in the room, responsible for people, and nobody had given me the language. Nobody showed me what it looks like when a leader holds someone accountable without breaking the relationship. Nobody let me inside the head of someone who’d been there before.
David Noël
I was the 7th employee at SoundCloud. I joined a handful of people in a rickety office in Berlin, and over eight years helped the company grow to 450 people across five offices. I went from individual contributor to global VP. I managed my first team without a single hour of training. Nobody taught me. I learned by doing it wrong, noticing, and trying again.
My cousin Mike in North Carolina once told me I’ve read more leadership books than anyone he knows. He has an MBA from Duke. I took that as a compliment and kept reading. But reading was never enough. I picked up frameworks, translated them to my context, tested them in the room, and kept only what worked on a Monday morning.
After SoundCloud, I spent ten years coaching executives and facilitating leadership workshops. Hundreds of leaders across startups, scale-ups, and established companies. The same gaps kept showing up: smart, ambitious people who could feel something was off with their team but couldn’t name it. People who avoided hard conversations because they’d never heard what a good one sounds like. People who confused being busy with leading.
This Academy is what I wish had existed when I was in that chair.
“People kept telling me to write a book. But a book sits on a shelf. What I wanted to build is something that sits with you: alive, practical, and yours to use the moment you need it.”David Noël
What’s inside.
Every framework in this Academy has been tested. Not in a classroom. In actual rooms with actual leaders facing actual problems. The content captures how I learned and how I teach: grounded in real scenarios, built for people who need to use it, not just understand it.
The conversation scripts are drawn from situations I’ve been in and seen hundreds of times. The Inner Track moments reveal what experienced leaders are thinking but not saying during the conversations that matter most. The reflection prompts are the questions I ask when I’m sitting across from someone who knows they need to change but hasn’t found the words yet.
The Academy follows one leader’s journey. She starts where most leaders start: realising that what got her here won’t get her there. That leading isn’t doing. That the identity she built on being the smartest person in the room is now the thing holding her team back. From that shift, she learns to name what’s broken, hold conversations she used to avoid, build trust she didn’t know she’d lost, and create a team that performs without needing her in every room. Her story is drawn from mine. Her mistakes were my mistakes. Her growth is the growth I’ve watched happen in the leaders I work with.
I built this Academy because the gaps most leaders struggle with are knowable, nameable, and addressable. Somebody just needs to show them. Not instead of learning the hard way. But so that when the hard moments come, you have language for what’s happening and a sense of what to do next.
This is not a course. Not a book. It’s a space where you can see yourself in someone else’s journey, find the words you’ve been missing, and walk into the room on Monday ready to lead differently.
The ForChiefs Academy is part of ForChiefs, an alliance of executive coaches and facilitators I started with colleagues who share a belief that leadership development should be practical, personal, and rooted in real experience. Your Sidekick in the Academy may be any member of the alliance. The product you’re using was built by me. The people behind it are people I trust.
Ready to start?