About Helen Franklin

Helen Franklin founded Free to Lead Consulting Limited so that she could do more of what she loves to do at work more often – enabling others’ success and fulfilment.

Profile:

Helen is an experienced coach, consultant and HR professional who thrives on enabling and facilitating those she works with to be free to lead.

As a one to one coach she creates a supportive and safe environment for clients to explore their thinking, to set goals, solve problems, develop mindset and behaviours and to enable them to lead authentically in their work and lives becoming more of who they can be.

As a team coach, Helen understands the importance of connection and alignment in, and between, teams, and is experienced at supporting teams to maximise performance and engagement.

As a mentor, Helen brings her wealth of experience in support of professionals early on their career track creating a partnership where the mentee explores their own thinking first and foremost and only drawing on her own experience when the mentee needs additional perspective.

Helen is genuinely interested in the success of others and brings a personable style while advancing an individual’s or organisation’s development through appropriate challenge where necessary.

Her research project for her Masters in Coaching & Mentoring Practice focused on the experience of coaching Millennial generation leaders and she is particularly interested in supporting high potential female leaders early in career to be confident, capable, balanced and successful.

Experience:

Prior to founding Free to Lead Consulting Limited, Helen acquired over 15 years’ experience as an HR Professional working within Wines & Spirits, Telecommunications, Food, Pet care and Confections industries. In addition, she has 7 years’ experience within Rail Systems in a previous engineering career.

Helen has held a board position as HR Director for UK and Ireland with a confections manufacturer as well as global talent and learning roles and internal organisational development consultancy roles.

Experiences include the successful cultural integration of a company of 17,000 employees, creation of learning academies for organisations to retain key competitive knowledge while embedding culture, project management of global, virtual teams within a matrix environment and a number of diverse organisational development projects with clients in locations such as Russia, USA, Belgium, China and Mexico.

Publications:

Helen is experienced in, and enjoys, coaching and mentoring high potential professionals early in their careers. With this in mind, she focused her Masters study in 2014 on the experiences of coaches in coaching Millennial leaders. An academic article related to a subset of findings from the research was published in a special edition of the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching & Mentoring in June 2015.

Qualifications:

  • MA Coaching & Mentoring Practice (Oxford Brookes University)
  • Certificate in Company Direction (Institute of Directors)
  • Diploma in Performance Coaching (Newcastle College)
  • Diploma in Personnel Management (MCIPD)
  • Certificate in Management (Open University)
  • BEng (Hons) Computer Systems Engineering (University of Bristol)