A Message from the Authors

We are delighted that like us you are curious about the science of leadership and how to apply important findings in your daily life as a leader. 

It's our honor to be a conduit to the work of thousands of dedicated researchers who want all of us to lead better. Their work to uncover what improves performance and well-being of followers and organizations will open your eyes, surprise or shake up your understanding, and galvanize your interest to grow into a better leader.

Our coaching voices will transport you through the stories, the science, and the practices from the first to the last page of our book. 

We invite you to join our tribe of leaders applying the best science and coaching ourselves and others toward greater impact with more ease and less strain.

Please contact us with any questions or requests about the book or authors, including media and speaking opportunities.

Jeffrey W. Hull, PhD, BCC

Jeff has been fascinated with leaders and leadership for over thirty years—an interest that began soon after his undergraduate work in psychology at Bowdoin College. His thirty year career has included multiyear stints as a corporate leader, leadership development consultant, counselor to leaders, professor of leadership, leadership coach, and leader of a global nonprofit institute.

  • Beginning his career in HR at Electronic Data Systems (EDS), where he wrote his master’s thesis at the University of Maryland on the leadership of Ross Perot and his firm’s merger with General Motors, Jeff spent a decade in tech and consulting. After six years as a director of HR for strategy consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, he became an entrepreneur, cofounding TGE (The Global Edge) Associates, a leadership development consultancy in New York City, where he developed and implemented programs in business strategy, corporate culture, vision and values, organization design and team building.  His client list included fortune 100 firms in finance and technology like Business Objects (now SAP), Mastercard, BNP Banque Paribas, American Express, MSCI, Sanofi Pharmaceuticals, and many more.

  • Jeff’s interest in understanding the psychology of effective leaders led him to graduate work in organizational psychology at Columbia University, and a PhD program in analytical/depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute. For his doctoral thesis, The Wilderness of Belonging: The Transformative Power of Healing Community, Jeff studied the leadership dynamics of Alcoholics Anonymous, Bion’s group therapy, and T-groups, among others. 

  • Having begun his career in the corporate world, it was a homecoming of sorts in 2006 when he started an executive coaching business, Leadershift, Inc. Since then, Jeff has worked with C-suite leaders of Fortune 50 companies, start-ups, and everything in between, in finance, pharmaceuticals, health care, software, and manufacturing. He has coached hundreds of leaders across the globe and published numerous articles on effective leadership strategies for Harvard Business Review and other publications. He was profiled in the New York Times and Investor’s Business Daily as a top coach during the financial crisis of 2008–2009 and joined Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches in 2020. 

    In 2018 and 2019, he undertook qualitative research in the coaching space that led to his second book, Flex: The Art and Science of Leadership in a Changing World (TarcherPerigee, 2019), which has been published in English, Portuguese, Korean, Mandarin, and Japanese. In 2024 Jeff was named by Thinkers 50 as one of the fifty top coaches across the globe. 

  • In 2013, Jeff sought to connect with the Institute of Coaching, founded in 2009 by his coauthor, Margaret Moore, along with Carol Kauffman and Susan David to help build the scientific base for the nascent coaching profession. He became the organization’s first director of education and business development and in 2021 the executive director, as well as earning a faculty appointment as an instructor in psychology at Harvard Medical School. 

    As executive director of the IOC, Jeff has returned to his roots as a leader, where, along with a dedicated team, he is responsible for serving over four thousand members across the globe with webinars, seminars, live events, and roundtables. He regularly keynotes and facilitates team programs for corporate boards and multinational organizations around the world, virtually and in person. 

    As a passionate servant leader, he views his role as a coach to coaches and a leader as coach. In writing this book, he is excited to see his chosen professions—leadership and coaching—getting the scientific attention and application they deserve. 

    Jeff makes his home in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where he and his partner pride themselves on learning to navigate the bike lanes, stroll along the beautiful canals, and venture into neighboring cities for art museums, dance, music, and cultural experiences across Europe and beyond.

Margaret Moore, MBA

For the past forty years, Margaret has worked at the intersection of science with entrepreneurial business, nonprofits, leadership, and coaching.

  • At the top of her MBA class at Canada’s Ivey School of Business, Margaret earned an international scholarship for her last term at London Business School. She started a seventeen-year biotechnology career at the UK’s Imperial Chemical Industries, which employed 110,000 people worldwide. Back in Canada at Connaught Laboratories, she led the largest vaccines market launch in Europe up until then, in Germany: a vaccine for infant bacterial meningitis, which was an overnight market success and immediately saved lives. 

    At the age of thirty-five, she was appointed CEO of a US vaccines biotech company (Virogenetics, owned by a French multinational vaccines company, later integrated into Sanofi Vaccines). In Vancouver, she was the start-up COO of a Canadian biotech company, NeuroVir, developing a treatment platform for glioblastoma and other cancers, and later purchased by German biotech company Medigene.

    Since 2000, as a transformational leader, Margaret envisioned the role of the professional coach on the health care team and cofounded two coaching organizations to realize that vision—Wellcoaches Corporation (2000) and the National Board for Health and Wellness Coaching (2010). 

    Margaret led Wellcoaches to become the first and leading coaching school for health professionals. Modeling coaching excellence, Wellcoaches has trained more than sixteen thousand coaches in fifty countries. In 2010, Margaret cofounded the National Board for Health and Wellness Coaching (NBHWC), now a nonprofit subsidiary of the National Board of Medical Examiners (NBME, which develops physician licensing exams). Margaret led the negotiation with NBME, which secured a multimillion investment to form NBHWC as an NBME affiliate. NBHWC delivers national standards and certification for health and well-being coaches and has now certified eleven thousand coaches. 

    Since 2019, Margaret has forged the industry's path to national reimbursement of health and well-being coaching services in medical practices. She is also starting a new business venture, expanding Wellcoaches to operationalize a vision—a turnkey, scalable coaching solution for medical practices. 

  • Combining a biology degree and MBA in her biotech career in UK, Canada, France, and US, Margaret led global teams of scientists, helping them navigate the business world. She helped nonscientist board members, investors, and media understand how science was translated into medical treatments.

    At Wellcoaches, she led the translation of science into coaching, culminating in the publication of a peer-reviewed textbook—the Coaching Psychology Manual (2008, 2015, and a forthcoming 2026 edition), which has now sold more than fifty thousand copies. Although the manual’s focus is coaching for health and well-being, the scientific translation is foundational to leadership coaching and this book’s translation of leadership science. The human building blocks of well-being, leadership, and coaching are one and the same.

    Margaret has coauthored ten peer-reviewed book chapters and twenty-eight peer-reviewed papers on coaching. She coauthored two Harvard Health books—Organize Your Mind, Organize Your Life (Harper Collins, 2012) and Organize Your Emotions, Optimize Your Life (William Morrow, 2016). Margaret is an editor and chapter author of the American Medical Association’s book Coaching in Medical Education (Elsevier, 2022) 

    In 2009, Margaret cofounded the Institute of Coaching (IOC) at McLean Hospital to broaden the integration of science into coaching practice across the coaching industry. She co-led from 2008 to 2024 the Coaching in Leadership and Healthcare conference offered by IOC, McLean Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. She has written more than a hundred articles (called research doses) for IOC, translating scientific papers into coaching practice. 

    As IOC chair from 2021 to 2024, Margaret co-led an IOC study of leadership and coaching during the pandemic and was the lead editor and writer of the report: Leading with Humanity: The Future of Coaching and Leadership. Next, with Jeff she inspired and mentored forty-five leadership coach members of IOC to write a handbook on science-based leadership models and educate coaches on leadership science. In 2023, she raised a $500K grant from IOC sponsor AceUp to build a science-based model of human-centered leadership and coaching. She also led a $500K investment in 2022 by the International Coaching Federation to fund IOC coaching research grants.

  • Margaret, aka Coach Meg, is a seasoned professional coach, coach trainer, and educator; she has coached hundreds of clients and leadership teams and has trained thousands of coaches and leaders over the past twenty-five years. Her coaching is devoted mainly to supporting physicians and health care and biotechnology industry leaders and teams. Her ability to translate science into coaching and leadership is in good part built on her hands-on coaching experience as a transformational coach. Her vision for this book is to help bring scientists, leaders, and coaches together to foster leadership excellence and support everyday leaders far and wide. 

    Margaret lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts, with her husband, Paul, in a house built in 1836. When not working out, cooking, and listening to jazz and classical music, they enjoy their lively and smart tribe of three kids (Margaret’s step-kids) and five grandkids—all emerging leaders.