Founder & CD at White Bear 🐻‍❄️ | Top 22 Female Founder 2022 ⚡️| Small Agency of the year 2022 🥇| CP Top 5 Agencies in UK ✏️ | Speaker and Host 🎤 | 16x Award winner 2022 🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆🏆

Kelly Mackenzie is a two-time founder, creative director, and unapologetic brand obsessive. She leads White Bear, the award-winning creative agency with studios in London, Dublin, and South America, recognised as Agency of the Year 2022 and winner of multiple DBA, Transform, Pent, Mobius, IDI, Creativepool, and Red Dot awards for work with brands like Red Bull, Netflix, Bold Bean, Tom Parker Creamery, and The Kerry Group.

She’s also the founder of People Like Me – a growing community for women in marketing to make real, meaningful connections in person, cutting through the algorithm and digital noise to create friendships, share challenges, and help each other shine.

Named one of Startup Magazine’s Top 22 Women of 2022 and a Creativepool Leader of 2023, Kelly is passionate about design thinking, education, and championing women in leadership. She has lectured at IADT and NUA, served on the board of The Big Idea, and mentored start-ups with Bethnal Green Ventures, Enterprise Nation, and SeedLegals.

Her philosophy? Build unforgettable brands, disrupt industries, and make people feel something – and have the craic while doing it.

Learn more at 
http://www.whitebearstudio.com
http://www.peoplelikeme.io


Subscribe to our newsletter at: https://mailchi.mp/whitebearstudio/newsletter
Or contact me directly at kelly@whitebearstudio.com

Kelly Mackenzie 🐻‍❄️

Sally Henderson, your High-Stakes Leadership Mentor

Leadership & Mentoring Expert

The difference between success and failure is not why you lead. It is HOW you lead.

I work with C-suite leaders and executive teams who are already successful and committed to getting better. You come to me when you're navigating high stakes situations, making critical decisions at pace and need to land significant results regardless of the scale of change around you.

Known for my straight talking, direct approach and ability to cut through to what's important quickly, I'm not a classic executive coach. I'm more directive in style and I will share my opinion and advice when the pressure is real and the stakes are highest.

As one CEO client put it: "Working with Sally is a breath of fresh air, a cold shower and warm hug all at once - and brilliant for it."

My work is for C-suite leaders and teams who are serious about mastering their leadership, willing to face the inevitable pain points of real growth, and determined to have a bloody good time doing it.

I'm the creator of The REAL Method, a leadership framework that helps C-suite leaders master their Role, Emotions, Acceleration and Leadership when it matters most. I'm also the author of The HOW of High Performance: Master high stakes leadership, achieve results that matter, and a TEDx and keynote speaker on leadership.

Clients include Accenture Song, Coca-Cola, Forbes, The IPA, IPG, M&C Saatchi, MSQ, NatWest, Nestlé, Next15, Octopus Investments, Reach, Saatchi & Saatchi, Sweaty Betty, The Social Element and VEVO.

"Sally is so much more than a coach or a mentor, she is a personal and professional accelerator! We have worked together on two major transitions – the post-sale integration of our business into fully owned status and my personal transition to corporate EMEA c-suite."
Jackie Stevenson, Global Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer, M&C Saatchi

I take on a limited number of senior leaders and executive teams each year. If this resonates, let's talk: https://www.sallyhenderson.co.uk/

The High-Stakes Leadership Mentor

Trusted expertise in driving leadership and business success for prominent brands and senior leaders.

My passion lies in creating the techniques, models and ideas to help senior teams and leaders to perform at their highest level; especially when the stakes are high. 

A ‘third lane’ for leadership development.

The Real Method™ fills a crucial gap in leadership development - a ‘third lane’ - that goes beyond classic coaching or traditional mentoring. 

To excel as a high-performance team or leader is non-negotiable. 

Executive teams and senior leaders come to me to get the practical and emotional toolkit needed to re-frame their mindset, to give them a clear perspective and the ability to perform even more effectively.

The results are proven and powerful. 

If your executive team and key senior leaders are ready to further accelerate high-performance leadership, we should work together.

Sally Henderson

I want to get my life’s work into as many hands as possible.

So I’m doing something I’ve never done before - a global book tour.

Yes I’m absolutely manifesting the life out of this to make it REAL Emma Harris!

🇬🇧 London
🇦🇪 Dubai
🇺🇸 New York
🇦🇺 Sydney

‘The HOW of High Performance: Master high-stakes leadership, achieve results that matter’ is written for senior leaders navigating change and complexity and gives a structured support system through The REAL Method.

The most successful leaders know they get better with the right help, support and challenge, and I know this book works.

Book tours don’t just happen. They need new connections, the bravery to ask for help, people willing to be generous with their ideas and support, to lean in just because they want to help and know they can.

And I’ve been blown away by just how wonderful and kind people are being. It’s making all the challenge and sheer grit of determination to write this book and put myself out there in the world feel so so worth it.

Good karma showed up recently in the loveliest way. 

I was introduced to a new team in a global organisation I’ve worked with before, and one person told me that a free webinar I’d run over two years ago about landing your dream role had been shared with her by a friend. She said it genuinely helped her get the position she’s in now.

It made me smile so much. You never know where the ripple goes when you put something useful out into the world just because you want to help and know you can, and there she was, living proof it comes back around.

So I’m asking for more of that good karma from you, my LinkedIn network, to help share my life’s work in this book. 

I’m looking for introductions to people who can help me set up Dubai, New York and Sydney, get booked for leadership keynotes, and connect me with brilliant people who can make this tour a success.

If you know someone who’d be brilliant for this, I’d love you to connect us. 

Thank you.​​​​​​​​​​​​😊

Sally Henderson, High-Stakes Leadership Mentor

For C-suite leaders & executive teams in high stakes moments who need straight answers, not endless self-discovery | Creator of The REAL Method | Author | TEDx & Keynote Speaker

No I didn’t win a big pitch.
I lost a pitch
I failed.
I’m no good.

That’s it everything else is going to start to unravel.

Feel familiar!!?

When we ‘fail’ to get an outcome we’ve worked hard for it sucks. It hurts. And it sure does bruise the ego!

BUT.

Winning happens in so many ways.

I did lose a big pitch at the end of last year. A pitch I’d put my heart and soul into, gave up my day off to work solidly on a bespoke brief, tweaked, reviewed, revised and delivered my best in a very tight turnaround. 

And after ALL that effort.
Didn’t win!
But I DID win in so many other ways.

You see at the same time I was under huge pressure to finish my book. The deadline was fixed. I also had many live clients and plenty of BAU demanding my attention and the book had to fit in around these commitments.

Had I won the new gig honestly I think I’d have tipped over into burnout.
I told the global CEO of this client this truth yesterday. That I was actually glad not to have won. They looked a bit shocked at my honesty but I am always about being real.

There will be future opportunities to pitch with the same client, plus many more that will come my way this year. 

The old me would have seriously bled at the perceived ‘rejection’.

The new me could see the naked truth that not winning the pitch wasn’t a failure at all. It was simply the right thing at the right time. 

What have you learnt about handling rejection and how has it helped you?

---

👋 I'm Sally Henderson, High-Stakes Leadership Mentor and specialise in working with C-suite Leaders and Executive Teams; especially through times of complexity and demanding change.

🔔 Follow me for practical tips and advice taken from my REAL Method Programme and decades of experience mentoring the best to help them be even better.

I am SO BORED of all the posts on here merging into one! 

AI is a useful tool and I use it to help me. The more I work with it the less I’ve come to realise it really isn’t a silver bullet. 

You have to have the idea, the content and clarity about your own tone of voice and what you want to stand for. The foundation work and hard work of original thinking can’t be outsourced. Because AI is only a tool and not a sentient unique being. It’s a machine that also often gets it wrong more than right and at times literally lies to you! 

Seeing a comment yesterday from Marco Bertozzi responding to a post offering prompts to get AI to write your LI content, prompted me to add my chat example below to his thoughts agreeing that everyone will just end up looking and sounding the same. The bots talking to the bots! 

Can’t just be Marco and I who are fed up? 

How we express ourselves through language is part of our identity. It reveals our personality, our sense of humour and our beliefs.

Less so when everyone is following Chat so obviously! 

Like this…

Open with a hook.

Say something else that says - it’s not this or this it’s this.

Write. In. Very. Short. Sentences. For. Impact

Maybe
Stack
Them
For 
Visual 
Impact 

Now at 3rd para insert ‘but here’s the thing’ or ‘lets be honest’

Scatter the word ‘actually’ throughout.

Remember it really matters.

And end with a what do you do when bored by generic Chat GPT writing rhythms?

Am I right?!?!! 🤣😭🤦‍♀️😩

Chat has its place but for me originality is way more interesting to read and connect with. 

(No AI was used in this post!!)

Executive teams are not a static entity. They are going through constant change, challenge and curve balls!

Whether your executive team is forming, norming or storming there will be positive and negative dynamics at play. This is totally normal whenever you bring a collection of ambitious, talented and determined individuals together.

The dynamic of positive and negative is to be welcomed and nurtured because no exec team or business every conquered their market or achieved their potential by being 100% aligned all of the time. This is not the role the collective is there to provide.

There is though a gulf of difference between an exec team that can enjoy healthy debate, tolerate friction and keep moving forward well and the exec team where you just scratch the surface and the politics run wildly with people falling down toxic cul-de-sacs of disagreement and mistrust.

An exec team has to have trust in place to be able to embrace their full potential and navigate the rapids of change.

But trust cannot be bought, borrowed or faked. In 2026 trust in and between your top people is a high-performance team leadership trait you simply cannot afford not to have in plentiful supply.

There's a technique from my leadership development programme, The REAL Method that Exec teams love for keeping trust healthy, accelerating growth and nipping any team dynamic problems in the bud.

It's called 'Uncomfortable Truths. Breaking Bread'.

A simple yet effective workshop that guides teams through what really matters when it comes to high performance, healthy team dynamics and successful outcomes.

If you'd like to find out more about Uncomfortable Truths and give your exec team dedicated expertise to help them master HOW they lead - especially through high stakes, drop me a note. 

(I love this picture taken last year when working with the awesome Commercial Senior Leadership Team at Reach. A superb bunch of great humans and collective team high performance)

---

👋 I'm Sally Henderson, High-Stakes Leadership Mentor and specialise in working with C-suite Leaders and Executive Teams; especially through times of complexity and demanding change.

🔔 Follow me for practical tips and advice taken from my REAL Method Programme and decades of experience mentoring the best to help them be even better.

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Sally Henderson

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The Battle

Kelly Mackenzie 🐻‍❄️

Sally Henderson

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Sally Henderson's LinkedIn Performance

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