Cherie, Partner at Evolution, is a CEO advisor and thought partner, coach, executive team advisor, and master facilitator. Her primary focus is supporting CEO’s, founders and their leadership teams navigate and accelerate scaling through key stages of growth, particularly early funding through Series C-E/Post IPO, where challenges of product market fit, mission/purpose/goals alignment, critical trade off's, strategic clarity, leadership scalability, organizational, talent and cultural evolution are critical. She has worked with Credit Karma, Twitter, Slack, Bandcamp, Climate Corp, Pure Storage, Twilio, Exploramed, Second Harvest (Silicon Valley) Food Bank, eero, CodeScience, Chan Zuckerberg Institute, KCG Holdings, Santa Cruz City Council, Arable and a wide range of early stage start-ups in Silicon Valley.
Cherie is valued for her authenticity, pragmatism, provocativeness and capacity for trusted partnership. She has a track record in activating critical business thinking, shifting mindsets and inspiring teams and organizations to problem solve and address the most burning acknowledged and unacknowledged issues.
Cherie’s work is built on a background of 25-plus years of global leadership experience within iconic companies such as Microsoft, EMI Recorded Music and Westpac Bank, as well as technology start-ups such as Zynga and the Nine Network in Australia. In these roles, she coached executives and facilitated strategy and personal leadership experiences, co-lead projects for business units, as Chief of Staff and focused on strategy-setting, M&A integration, design thinking, organizational execution, change management and significant brand shifts.
Cherie holds a MBA from the University of Washington, a Bachelor of Business from the Queensland University of Technology, is a facilitator of Interpersonal Dynamics at Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), is a certified coach from New Ventures West (NVW) Institute and has studied Integral Psychology at the California Institutes of Integral Studies (CIIS). Her work is influenced by business strategists, such as Gary Hamel and Ronald Heifetz from HBS, Otto Sharmer from MIT and a wide range of group dynamic processes including T-Group, NLP and Gestalt circle work.
Cherie is a proud Kiwi who also loved living, working and traveling in Australia, Europe and Asia. She enjoys the ride with her patient husband and wonderfully rambunctious 8 year old daughter, they are the rocks of her life.
“Working with Cherie was a critical step in my growth as a professional and a person. My role was in transition and our company was growing quickly - our leadership team was smart enough to engage Cherie to help us navigate all that change and develop younger team leaders like myself. It was a great call!
Cherie’s incredible depth of experience working at all stages of companies (early stage to multi-billion dollar) was valuable, to say the least. She’s approachable, wise, agile, and perceptive - a very productive combination for the work she undertook with our team. It’s hard to carve time out of the schedule of a start-up executive but within days I found myself looking forward to (and prioritizing) my weekly time with Cherie.”
“If you are working with Cherie - as her friends and work associates all know - you are very lucky. Cherie has a special way of traversing the range of challenges that leaders confront in aligning their organizations to change and or achieve great things. From making the Business strategy meaningful through to developing individual thinking and mindsets of leaders, Cherie can show the way.”
“Not only did I have the pleasure of watching Cherie run a global Learning & Development function at a startup growing from 100 people to 4000 people in 3 years, but she’s the first call I make at every company I go to for executive coaching & leadership team development and facilitation. Working from a place of warmth and direct truth, she has such a wealth of experiences and tools to draw from across small and large companies, she gets results and change very quickly, even with the most skeptical of founder CEOs and leaders.”