A leader’s performance rests on clarity,
connection and grounding.
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“I have lived the life my clients are living.”
Three dimensions define my background:
Deep experience of the leadership role: more than fifteen years of it, on both sides of the table, in executive committee and on boards. Across a wide range of contexts and stakes, from 2,500 to 400,000 employees; listed, family-owned and private-equity-owned companies; in FMCG, retail, logistics and telecoms. And on international scopes: Europe for the most part, including as an expatriate, but also Asia, Latin America and Central America.
Expertise in the human side of corporate transformation: in the HR, communications and CSR functions I led, I have run reorganisations, driven cultural change, supported CEO and shareholder transitions, and faced health, geopolitical, financial and governance crises.
A coaching practice with leaders and their teams, sustained for twelve years: trained as a coach and specialised in team coaching from 2014, I have kept adding complementary disciplines in order to address people in all their complexity and all their potential – mental, emotional, physical: head, heart, body.
Last but not least, because problems do not stop at the office door, I have had my share of personal difficulties. They have taught me as much as the successes, and they allow me today to work with my clients with everything that lived experience brings. I understand what they are facing, and how to light their way through it.
Cécile CLOAREC, Founder
Executive coach · Senior advisor
Non-executive director · Former CHRO of international groups
FOUR CONVICTIONS
1. A company’s project succeeds through the engagement of the people who carry it
and the transformation now under way with AI more than any other.
2. The appetite to work as a team and the ability to cooperate are under-used performance levers,
and they call for a specific management approach.
3. How leaders show up spreads: the way they decide, listen and carry pressure shapes the success,
the fulfilment and the health of their teams.
4. Leaders perform better when they work on their own mental, relational and physical resources
much as elite athletes do.
I wanted a firm that speaks to leaders in their own language, and that addresses their three concerns together: strategy, relationships and vital energy. Theirs first, their teams’ by extension.
What our name says
Rhumb Lines first: on a compass rose, a rhumb is one of the thirty-two directions open to a navigator. A rhumb line is the route that holds a constant bearing — rarely the shortest, but the one that lets you know, at every moment, where you are heading. Leading looks a great deal like that.
And Partners: for each engagement, I bring together the team the situation calls for — independent consultants and coaches, sector experts, specialist practitioners. You keep a single point of contact, accountable for the engagement, and you get a team calibrated to your situation. It is what allows me to run international projects with the right people in the right languages, rather than defaulting to English alone.
Our approach
A leader working with leaders
I know how a three-year plan actually gets built, how a collective agreement is negotiated, how an executive team and its board interact — because I have lived all of it, often, and from the inside. It widens the ground we can cover together — and how fast we cover it.
It also changes what we look at. Most coaching works on strategy or on relationships, sometimes both. Rarely on the physical dimension. Rhumb Lines Partners treats all three with equal attention, because they feed into one another: fatigue erodes the quality of decisions, a draining relationship hardens a leader who is inspiring by nature, an unclear course saps everyone’s energy.
Head – clarity. Setting priorities, making trade-offs without giving in to the short term, protecting the space for creativity.
Heart – connection. Moving past what blocks you, daring to do things differently, building teams that are engaged and aligned.
Body – grounding. Setting the right pace, catching the early signs of strain, asserting your presence and keeping your judgement sharp even under heavy load.
Our commitments
CONFIDENTIALITY
Everything we discuss stays strictly confidential. When the company pays, the sponsor is told the objectives and how the work is progressing, never what is said in a session, never individual results from any personality inventory. We work to the International Coaching Federation code of ethics, one-to-one and with teams.
FREEDOM
If we are not the right people for you, we say so, and we point you towards a better-suited practitioner where we can — disclosing any commercial arrangement that would link us to them. We also work to make ourselves unnecessary: a successful engagement leaves a leader with new reflexes to act on their own, or a team able to regulate itself.
RELENTLESS CARE
You pay us to help you get through something, not to hear that you are right. We take nobody’s side because we are committed to everyone. We will show you your talents, the limits you set for yourself, the opportunities you cannot yet see, at the right moment and in the right way, because we are allies.
YOUR QUESTIONS
Do I need to be going through a difficult time to start this kind of work?
Not necessarily. Most of the leaders I work with are doing well.
They are taking on a wider remit; they sense the need for a second wind; or they face a situation, a project, that deserves a clear view and the support of a sparring partner.
Head, heart, body: which one do you start with?
The one that is stuck.
An unclear course wears you down. A relationship turning sour hardens everything. Settled fatigue damages decisions and creativity. You come in through the engine that has failed, and you leave with all three.
The first conversation is there to spot which one comes first.
Where does coaching end and therapy begin?
We work on your professional situation and what you want from it. Your personal history comes into it when it sheds light on that situation. If a subject belongs to your private life, it calls for another professional: we say so, and we point you to one.
Does what is said stay between us when the company is paying?
Yes. What is said with the leaders we work with is strictly confidential.
Your HR department will know whether the work is progressing. Not what we say to each other in session.
Where does your challenge sit – clarity, connection or grounding?
For you, for your team, for your organisation: a first conversation brings out what is really at play, and lets us check that we are the right people.
