Caroline Webb

Caroline Webb is a leadership coach, management consultant and economist who is widely recognized as one the world’s leading experts on using insights from behavioral science to improve professional effectiveness. Her best-selling book on that topic – How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life – has been published in 17 editions and over 60 countries. She is a former Partner of McKinsey & Company, where she continues to serve as a Senior Advisor.

During her twelve years with McKinsey & Company, Caroline co-founded McKinsey’s leadership practice. As well as building the firm’s leadership development business, she designed McKinsey’s approach to transforming senior team dynamics, led the firm’s client work on organizational effectiveness in the healthcare sector, and founded McKinsey’s flagship leadership development course for senior female executives. Before McKinsey, Caroline spent the 1990s working in public policy as an economist and central banker. Her work included global economic forecasting for the UK government and institution building in post-communist eastern Europe.

Caroline has coached senior leaders on every (inhabited) continent and in an unusually wide range of roles, from CEOs and founders to a government minister and a princess. Her consulting experience, analytical background and writing skills mean that she is able to go beyond the role of a traditional executive coach and can act as a broad confidential adviser for her clients – whether they are reshaping their organization’s structure and culture, rethinking its strategic direction, evolving their team, or seeking new ways to communicate their ideas. Whatever the topic, Caroline takes an evidence-based approach that helps her clients understand how new ways of working are supported by findings from behavioral economics, neuroscience, and psychology.

Caroline has been a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, and her work appears in the HBR Guide to Managing Conflict and HBR Guide to Being Productive. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Economist, The Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Inc., Forbes, Fortune, the BBC, WIRED, World Economic Forum, Fast Company, Quartz, and Business Insider. She is a Founding Fellow of the Harvard-affiliated Institute of Coaching, and has degrees in Economics from Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Her book is a core text for the "Work, Wisdom, and Happiness" MBA course at NYU Stern, where she lectures each year. She has also guest lectured at Harvard, Chicago Booth School of Business, Columbia Business School, and London Business School. She is on the Advisory Boards of a number of applied behavioral science ventures: Open Mind, Ethical Systems, and Behavioral Sight. Caroline is based in New York but travels frequently to coach and speak around the world.