Welcome to the Recovering Leader, designed to help you achieve your goals as a leader, by sharing what works for others with similar questions and challenges.
Here you'll find almost 700 posts spanning practical experiences over almost two decades of coaching other senior executives and emerging leaders, which followed a career as a fintech executive, and my coach training at Georgetown.
Here I seek to share ideas and lessons-learned both as a coach and an observer of my client's and colleagues’ approaches to leadership. Helping executives and emerging leaders create a world better led ... it's is my calling.
My origin story in under 300 words
It sounds cliché that I started in the mail room (of a bank outside of Boston)-. That was shortly after ending a brief and, I will admit, not-too-promising career in the performing arts. With a broken foot (a stage injury) in a cast, I made my way to the mailroom at BayBank / Waltham at age 24, because, in my literal-mindedness, “banks have money, and I’m broke.”
My first decade took me from there to bank teller, to telephone representative in financial services, to project manager to PriceWaterhouse consulting to Charles Schwab—there I joined as a VP in projects. Nine years later I left Schwab, having made it to COO of the largest division. While everyone called me “brave” (i.e., “crazy”) to jump ship from the big title, spot at the table, and happy bank account, I knew I needed to follow a path with heart.
Working with my coach at that point, I then went back to school (Georgetown University) and got certified as a Leadership Coach in 2004, and have since been an executive coach, then Region Head for a great coaching firm called Goodstone Group, and most recently (as of 2019) a Partner at Heidrick Consulting, Lead for the Executive Coaching Practice in the Americas.
I hope my blog helps you discover something helpful!
David Peck
California, USA
