Thought Leader and Influencer Interview with Amii Barnard-Bahn, CEO & Founder, Barnard-Bahn Coaching & Consulting

At a Glance

Amii Barnard-Bahn, CEO & Founder, Barnard-Bahn Coaching & Consulting

Focus Areas: Careers, Coaching, HR, Leadership

Thinkers360 In-Depth Profile & Portfolio: Amii Barnard-Bahn

Social Media: LinkedIn

Highlighted Content: Guide to Retaining Your Best People, Promotions Aren’t Just About Your Skills — They’re About Your Relationships, 6 Mistakes Leaders Make When Announcing Layoffs,

Book: The PI Guidebook: How the Promotability Index® Can Help You Get Ahead in Your Career.

Thinkers360 Leaderboards: Top 50 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers on HR 2025, Top 50 Global Thought Leaders and Influencers on Careers 2025.

Thought Leader and Influencer Interview

Thinkers360 thought leader interviews profile prominent members of the Thinkers360 community who embody the power of ideas in their work. In this edition, we speak with Amii Barnard-Bahn, CEO of Barnard-Bahn Coaching & Consulting.

Amii is an internationally recognized executive coach, author, and keynote speaker. She is the creator of the Promotability Index®, a leadership assessment and career development toolkit that has been used by thousands of professionals worldwide to accelerate their growth and success.

A regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches, Amii is known for helping leaders and organizations navigate complex challenges, transform workplace culture, and build inclusive systems where people can thrive.

Her areas of focus include executive coaching, leadership ethics, promotability, and organizational transformation. She has earned recognition on the Thinkers360 leaderboard as a Top Global Thought Leader in Careers, Legal, and Coaching among other accolades.

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Thinkers360: Could you please share some insights into your background and areas of expertise?

ABB: My career has been built on a foundation of helping leaders and organizations thrive through challenging transformations. I’m a former Fortune 50 executive and Georgetown attorney who spent over two decades in C-suite roles including Chief Compliance Officer, Chief Administrative Officer, and Chief Human Resources Officer at companies like McKesson and Allianz.

Today, I serve as CEO of Barnard-Bahn Coaching & Consulting, where I specialize in accelerating the success of C-suite executives and their teams. My expertise spans executive coaching, business ethics, and organizational culture transformation. I’m also the creator of the Promotability Index® – a leadership assessment and career toolkit that’s helped thousands of professionals advance their careers and organizations improve their talent development.

As a Professional Certified Coach, I bring a unique perspective that blends rigor with coaching intuition. I’ve been honored to be selected as a member of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches and contribute regularly to Harvard Business Review on topics ranging from promotability to leadership challenges, such as announcing layoffs.

Thinkers360: What are your current responsibilities, and could you describe a typical day?

ABB: My diversity of work keeps me engaged, curious, and learning. I typically start each morning reviewing my coaching clients’ progress and preparing for our sessions. I might spend the morning coaching a CEO navigating a complex reorganization, then shift to facilitating a leadership team retreat for a Fortune 500 company in the afternoon.

As part of my consulting, I often advise clients on organizational development, talent management, strategy, and risk management – work that leverages my decades of in-house HR and legal experience. I frequently speak at conferences and contribute thought leadership articles, often drawing connections between leadership effectiveness and strategic business practices.

One constant is my commitment to advancing equity and fairness in the workplace. Whether I’m mentoring through the 100 Coaches community or designing promotability workshops, helping leaders create systems where everyone has a genuine opportunity to thrive is central to everything I do. At its core, this work is about creating a successful company where everyone is enabled to do their best work.

Thinkers360: What is the most rewarding aspect of your current role?

ABB: Without question, it’s witnessing the moment when a leader realizes they have the capability to navigate through their organization’s most challenging periods. I recently worked with a newly appointed CEO who inherited a company facing significant regulatory compliance issues and a fractured leadership culture. The board’s confidence was shaken, employees were uncertain about the future, and stakeholders were demanding answers.

Through our coaching work, we focused on rebuilding trust while maintaining business performance during the crisis. Using frameworks from the Promotability Index®, we identified that her strength in operational excellence needed to be paired with enhanced stakeholder communication and coalition-building skills. She learned to lead with transparency while projecting confidence, and to unite her leadership team around a clear path forward.

Eighteen months later, not only had they successfully resolved the regulatory issues, but employee engagement scores had improved dramatically and the company exceeded their financial targets. More importantly, she told me she now felt equipped to handle whatever challenges might come next. That transformation – from a leader managing in crisis mode to one who can turn challenges into opportunities – is why I do this work.

I’m also deeply fulfilled by creating tools and content that scale beyond my individual coaching practice. When someone I’ve never met tells me that an article I wrote or the Promotability Index® helped them navigate their own leadership challenges, I’m reminded of the ripple effect thoughtful leadership development can create.

Thinkers360: How do you leverage the Thinkers360 platform to achieve your professional goals?

ABB: Thinkers360 serves as an important component of my broader thought leadership strategy. I appreciate being part of a community that recognizes expertise across various domains, and the rankings provide external validation of my work in the careers and legal spaces.

I view the platform as a way to showcase my expertise alongside other thought leaders and to contribute to important conversations about leadership and organizational effectiveness. I believe it adds credibility to my overall professional brand.

The platform also helps me stay connected with trends and insights from other experts globally, which enriches my perspective and keeps me current on emerging leadership challenges across different industries.

Editor’s Note: See Amii Barnard-Bahn’s profile to work with her directly.

Thinkers360: What are your preferences for collaborating with brands seeking to engage with you as a thought leader?

ABB: I’m most energized by partnerships that align with my core mission of helping leaders and organizations reach their highest potential. I prefer working with brands that are genuinely committed to leadership development, ethical business practices, and creating inclusive workplace cultures – not just checking boxes.

My ideal collaborations involve multiple touchpoints: perhaps a keynote address on promotability or ethical leadership, followed by executive coaching for key leaders, and thought leadership content that provides lasting value to their audience. I particularly enjoy partnerships where I can share both strategic insights and practical tools that participants can immediately implement.

I also value transparency and mutual respect in these relationships. I’m happy to discuss how my Promotability Index® assessment, leadership retreats, or speaking topics can support specific organizational goals. The most successful partnerships I’ve had are those where the company sees me as a strategic advisor, not just a speaker or content creator.

Thinkers360: What is your key piece of advice for aspiring thought leaders?

ABB: Start with authentic expertise, not personal branding. Too many aspiring thought leaders focus first on building a platform rather than deepening their knowledge and impact. True thought leadership emerges from solving real problems and helping real people achieve meaningful results.

My second piece of advice: be generous with your insights. Some of my most influential articles and tools came from sharing solutions I’d developed for coaching clients or organizational challenges. When you freely share valuable insights, you build trust and demonstrate the depth of your expertise.

Finally, stay curious and humble. The moment you think you have all the answers is the moment you stop growing as a leader and thinker. I learn something new from every coaching client, every speaking engagement, and every interaction with fellow leaders and colleagues.

The goal isn’t to be famous – it’s to be helpful. When you focus on creating genuine value for others, thought leadership naturally follows.

Thinkers360: What are the most common ‘promotability blind spots’ you see in high-performing executives?

ABB: The biggest blind spot I see is what I call “expertise addiction” – high performers who got to where they are by being the smartest person in the room, but now need to shift from being the expert to being the leader who develops other experts. They’re still trying to have all the answers instead of asking the right questions and empowering their teams to find solutions.

The second major blind spot is underestimating the power of relationships and strategic visibility. These executives often believe that excellent work speaks for itself, but they’re not investing enough time in building coalitions, communicating their impact to key stakeholders, or positioning themselves for larger opportunities. They’re heads-down executing brilliantly, but they’re invisible to the people making promotion decisions.

A third pattern I see frequently is what I call “permission seeking” – waiting to be asked or invited into bigger roles instead of actively advocating for themselves and their ideas. They assume someone else will recognize their potential and tap them on the shoulder, rather than proactively building the case for why they should be considered for advancement.

These blind spots are actually why I developed the Promotability Index® – to help high performers identify these gaps before they derail their careers. The assessment looks at five key areas that predict advancement, and consistently, the executives who struggle with promotions are strong in technical competence but weaker in strategic relationships, executive presence, and self-advocacy.

The irony is that these blind spots often stem from the very qualities that made them successful in the first place – their focus on excellence, their humility, their dedication to the work. But at a certain level, those same qualities can become limitations if they’re not balanced with more strategic leadership behaviors.

Thinkers360: As both an attorney and executive coach, how does this dual expertise benefit your clients?

ABB: This combination gives me a perspective that’s relatively rare in the coaching world. When I’m working with a CEO, CHRO, or general counsel, I understand the regulatory pressures they’re facing, the board dynamics they’re navigating, and the risk considerations that keep them up at night – because I’ve been in those roles myself.

Most executive coaches are excellent at helping leaders develop self-awareness and communication skills, but they may not fully grasp the complexity of leading in highly regulated industries or managing through compliance crises. My legal background allows me to coach executives not just on how to be better leaders, but on how to lead effectively within the constraints and opportunities of their regulatory environment.

For example, when I’m coaching a compliance officer who’s struggling to influence business leaders, I can help them understand both the leadership dynamics at play and the strategic business case for their recommendations. I know what it feels like to be the person in the room saying “we can’t do that” and how to reframe that conversation into “here’s how we can achieve your business objectives while managing our risk.”

The attorney training also brings a certain analytical rigor to my coaching approach. I’m naturally inclined to ask probing questions, examine assumptions, and help clients think through the implications of their decisions – skills that translate beautifully to executive coaching.

Ultimately, my clients get someone who can coach them on leadership presence and influence while also understanding the business and regulatory realities they’re operating within. That combination helps them develop solutions that are both leadership-sound and practically implementable in their specific organizational context.</

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Thought Leader and Influencer Interview with Amii Barnard-Bahn, CEO & Founder, Barnard-Bahn Coaching & Consulting

At a Glance

Amii Barnard-Bahn, CEO & Founder, Barnard-Bahn Coaching & Consulting

Thought Leader and Influencer Interview

Join us on Thinkers360 — Connecting Global Brands with the World’s Foremost Thought Leaders, Analysts and Influencers for Game-Changing Results!

Author: Yessenia Sembergman

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