Values the ongoing community relationships that were made through her Mastered programme journey

Home for 2019 Mastered graduate Sophie Schwass is New Zealand. She shares how much she values the ongoing community relationships that were built through the programme, and how the disciplines she developed during the Mastered journey can shape professional pathways.

The Parachute You Don’t Notice Until It’s Not There

Leaving my CEO role in New Zealand, I stepped into a void. In London, where I had spent seventeen years building my professional life, I had what I can only describe as a tightly knitted parachute. In New Zealand, home technically, but professionally unfamiliar after so long away, I had a thin spider web. I had left the parachute behind when I crossed the equator. I just hadn’t noticed. The spider web held, but it took that moment to understand what networks actually are to me: not contacts, not opportunities, not a LinkedIn metric. They are the infrastructure of my courage. The Meyler Campbell community forms part of that.

5am, a ski slope in France, and a call that could have ended my career.

I moved from law into increasingly senior Chief of Staff and COO roles at Barclays and Lloyds, before being approached for the UK COO role at Clifford Chance while partway through my Mastered journey. A Meyler Campbell alum coached me through the wobbles of a six-month selection process. In late February 2020, I had been quietly building an incident management team and running scenario plans while those around me were actively ‘discouraging’ it. On the Monday following school holidays, at 5am, I called our Managing Partner on a ski slope in France, woke him up, made the case for requiring Italy-returnees to stay home, and he backed me completely – before the outcome was knowable, with my reputation on the line if I had it wrong.

What Meyler Campbell had given me was not a formula for moments like that. It was something more durable: a reflective practice, a discipline of really listening, and the steadiness to act before consensus had formed. Leading with incomplete information and no blueprint has since become the permanent condition of leadership. That practice started to feel less like a coaching skill and more like a survival tool – and the seed of my current work with OneLeap.

A living ecosystem, not an alumni group.

Seven years on, I am struck by how the community shows up for me: an incubator group from my 2019 cohort, still offering honest perspectives; a mixed MC and non-MC coaching group meeting every six weeks across time zones; another MC alum, who graduated alongside me, as my long-term co-coaching partner. And recently, when I needed someone who had built and commercialised a psychometric – for our work developing an entrepreneurial judgment tool with researchers at Stanford – I put it to the Meyler Campbell Community WhatsApp group. Multiple exceptional options came back within hours. That was not accidental. It was the compound interest of the pleasure of showing up.

Coming home and discovering you are a stranger.

In 2023, the pull home to family in Aotearoa, New Zealand, won over a Global COO pathway. A CEO role followed – one that turned out not to be the right long-term fit. Recognising that clearly, and moving on with purpose, felt less like a setback than a signal. I built my own consulting and coaching practice with the strength of my UK community behind me from afar. When my client, OneLeap, invited me onboard as SVP for a deliberate year’s engagement, my MC training proved invaluable.  OneLeap brings an entrepreneurial lens to strategy and leadership under uncertainty.  The MC craft of deep listening and holding multiple frames helps me translate between worlds: between the Stanford researchers building our entrepreneurial judgment tool and the senior leaders it’s built for, and between our global community of successful entrepreneurs and the executives who will use the mentoring offer I’m developing to help them see opportunity and speed differently. My Mastered muscles have never worked harder.

When I choose to jump.      

Every move has required more courage than competence. What made each one possible was not fearlessness. It was the quality of the people around me: the cohort still challenging me seven years on, the co-coaching relationship that holds up a mirror to remind me who I am at my best, the WhatsApp message that produced five exceptional options within the hour, the 5am call to a Managing Partner who said yes.

The parachute is something I constructed incrementally and accidentally, conversation by conversation, cohort by cohort. I only noticed its strength when I had to jump.

Thank you for being woven through it.

Sophie Schwass (she/her) is a Meyler Campbell Mastered graduate (2019), executive coach, and SVP at OneLeap. She works with senior leaders in the UK, US, and APAC. She is based in Aotearoa New Zealand and misses the MC in-person events more than she lets on. You can reach her on the Meyler Campbell Community WhatsApp group.