Sarah Bellendaine
Executive Coach, Founder, & Strategic People & Operations Consultant
I partner with founders, CEOs, and senior executives navigating growth, complexity, and inflection points. The work centers on three things: strengthening leadership effectiveness, aligning organizational design with strategy, and stabilizing performance under pressure, especially when the stakes are high and the margin for error is thin.That combination comes from two backgrounds most coaches don't have together. Fourteen-plus years leading people and operations functions, including doubling revenue as a GM/COO while building the hiring and performance systems underneath that growth. A decade of executive coaching on top of it, working directly with senior leaders through restructuring, succession, and high-stakes conflict. I bring structural rigor and psychological depth to the same conversation, because leadership problems are rarely just personal and rarely just structural. They're both at once.
Where I add value
Founder and CEO advisory: The transition from builder to enterprise leader, board communication and executive presence, decision clarity under pressure, and the isolation that comes with the role.
Organizational design and scale: Structure aligned to strategy, role clarity, succession pipelines, and performance systems built for remote and hybrid teams.
High-stakes employee issues: Complex performance management, senior-level conflict, and reorganizations that carry reputational risk.
Leadership development: Confidential 1:1 coaching, team alignment intensives, and burnout prevention built on recovery capacity, not slogans.​
How I work
VERVE™: leadership intelligence, not intuition
Alongside the coaching and advisory work, I created VERVE, a diagnostic that measures joy, energy, and organizational conditions to determine whether a leadership team is performing at its ceiling or being held below it. VERVE™ reflects new understanding to the individual while revealing the system underneath them, often surfacing friction months before it shows up in performance or retention data.
Engagement models: Executive coaching retainers, fractional People or Operations leadership, strategic advisory for growth or crisis, and leadership intensives for founders and executive teams. Every engagement is confidential and built around the specific complexity in front of us, not a fixed program. Clients describe the work as grounded and direct: empathy paired with enough challenge to design a plan they can execute.
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Clients bring me in for the moments that don't have a clean playbook. I've advised boards on executive hiring and governance transitions, led a national distributed service organization through scale while protecting mission integrity, and coached senior leaders through the kind of conflict that threatens to derail a team from the inside.
Schedule a complimentary consultation
In a short call, we'll look at what you're navigating right now and whether coaching, advisory, or a VERVE™ diagnostic is the right starting point. You'll leave with a clearer read on the situation, whether or not we end up working together.