Sonia McDonald built the thing she needed and couldn't get.
Thirty-five years in leadership, people and culture — and one stretch, early on, when there was nobody to call.
At 33, she wasn't coaching anyone.
She was a single mother in a foreign country. Broke, unemployed, and out of options. No safety net and no plan beyond the next week.
What she remembers most about that period isn’t the money. It’s that there was nobody to think it through with. No coach, no mentor, nobody whose job it was to help her work out what to say and what to do next. She had to figure it out alone, badly, at three in the morning.
She rebuilt from there — and then spent thirty-five years making sure other people didn’t have to do it the same way.
“I couldn’t be in every person’s corner personally. So I built something that could.”
What thirty-five years actually built.
Recognised for
Thirty-five years in rooms where it was going badly.
Thirty-five years in leadership, people and culture, twenty of them as CEO of LeadershipHQ. Organisations across construction, mining, technology, education, banking and professional services — industries not famous for enthusiasm about change. First-time supervisors through to chief executives.
That’s where the method in Worksparks comes from. Not from a framework someone drew on a whiteboard, but from several thousand conversations with people who were stuck, and finding out what actually helped them get unstuck.
It’s neuroscience-informed, which in practice means it takes seriously that you can’t think clearly while your body is convinced something is on fire. Sorting that out first is why the rest works.
Worksparks is built and run by LeadershipHQ.
LeadershipHQ is Sonia’s leadership consultancy, and she has been its CEO for twenty years — programs, coaching and culture work with organisations across Australia and internationally. It’s where the Worksparks method comes from, and it’s why the coaching isn’t generic.
It’s worth being straight about what that does and doesn’t mean.
LeadershipHQ sells leadership programs to employers. Worksparks promises you that your employer can’t see what you write. If your organisation bought your seat, you’d be reasonable to wonder whose side this is on.
So, plainly: your conversations are yours. LeadershipHQ can’t read them. Your employer can’t read them. There is no version of that arrangement available for purchase, at any price, to any client. It isn’t a setting — it’s how the thing is built.
More about the consultancy at leadershiphq.com.au, and about Sonia’s speaking and coaching at soniamcdonald.com.