Alumni Spotlight: Patrice Ford-Lyn (MPP 1999), CEO | Executive Coach

Patrice Ford Lyn is an Executive Coach and Transformational Facilitator.

Alumni Spotlight

Patrice Ford Lyn, MPP 1999

CEO | Executive Coach | Transformational Facilitator

Tell us about life after the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS).

After graduating from HKS, I launched a national government agency in Jamaica, guided two US-based start-ups, and facilitated leadership team discussions that transformed the vision and strategy of organizations across numerous industries and geographies. In 2010, I started Catapult Change, an executive coaching and consulting business committed to supporting the success and wellbeing of under-represented executives and their teams. 

Describe your role as an executive coach.

I guide clients through mindset shifts, unlocking their ability to see challenges as opportunities and move past their doubt into bold, life-changing action. For example, when clients come to me, they often feel overwhelmed by their responsibilities. I guide them in determining what they can delete, delegate, and defer creating greater spaciousness and ease. From this more expansive space, we work on becoming superior strategists and visionary leaders.

How did your HKS experience impact your career.

As an HKS student, I volunteered for the first-ever global conference for women world leaders - women who had been presidents, premiers or prime ministers of countries. While chaperoning Pamela Gordon Banks, then sitting Premier of Bermuda, and supporting Dame Mary Eugenia Charles, former Prime Minister of Dominica, I was invited into an intimate conversation with these world leaders. I listened as they shared their challenges and triumphs. Having them then turn and ask me about my dreams and aspirations was a moment of reckoning - opening the aperture of what was possible if I played bigger in my life.  

In another example, after I graduated from HKS, a former classmate inquired about my interest in an international opportunity with the Government of Jamaica. I interviewed for and accepted the position, changing the trajectory of my career. Because of this HKS connection and my subsequent work co-authoring Jamaica’s strategy for youth development, I moved into leadership early in my career - becoming both the National Director of Youth and the Director of Jamaica’s National Center for Youth Development in my mid-twenties.

What topic would you select if you could return to HKS to teach current students?

Amy Edmondson has published insights on the importance of psychological safety to organizational leadership that I currently use in my work with clients.  I am excited to delve further into this research to enhance the safety of teams so that executives can bring their best ideas to innovation. Therefore, I would teach a leadership development course that illustrates how psychological safety, or the lack thereof, impacts individual and organizational outcomes. 

How can we connect with you?

You can connect with me via my website, Catapult Change, or via LinkedIn where you may enjoy my executive briefs.

Any final words?

To take on emerging challenges, leaders need to continually reimagine what’s possible.  That’s one reason executives work with coaches. Having a partner walk with you and help you to navigate your blindspots and open your aperture is game changing.