Kate Smyth

Kate Smyth is the founder of Meraki People, a board-level organisational design consultancy working with the founders and leadership teams of scaling businesses, typically between £3 million and £100 million in turnover. Her proposition is simple: most of what looks like a people problem is actually a structural one, and she works with the people who hold the power to change it.

Kate has built a reputation among founder-led businesses for spotting the organisational design failures sitting underneath succession bottlenecks, leadership friction and stalled growth. She has led board and leadership transitions, run engagement and culture diagnostics that translate into practical action for senior teams, and facilitated leadership groups through periods of significant change.

She holds several non-executive director roles, including with ABM, and is the IoD's South Ambassador for Organisational Design and Development. She facilitates a CEO peer forum for Business Leader and guest lectures at Royal Holloway, University of London. She was previously named National Coach of the Year and now judges the same awards.

Her path here wasn't a straight line. Kate trained and practised as a lawyer at a magic circle firm before spending fifteen years in live events and experiential marketing, working with organisations including the BBC, British Airways, Jack Morton and Powwow. She moved into corporate change and transformation work, then qualified as an ICF-accredited coach. It was that combination of legal training, commercial pressure and hands-on behavioural work that shaped the framework she now brings to boards and leadership teams.

Kate is currently writing Tales from the Boardroom, a collection of fables drawn from real boardroom dynamics, each one built to make a structural lesson land the way a story does rather than a slide deck.

She lives in Ascot with her two children and two Springer Spaniels, Pepper and Islay.