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For organisations and their leaders

Develop better leaders.
Build stronger teams.

Donovan Learning is a two-principal leadership practice. We help organisations, leadership teams and senior leaders raise leadership performance, and sustain it, through executive coaching, tailored development programmes, facilitation and assessment.

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High performance should be sustainable. That principle runs through everything we do.

Coaching · Development · Facilitation
70+*Years of combined leadership and learning experience
2Principals: practitioner depth and academic rigour
4Disciplines: coaching, development, facilitation, assessment
1Standard: behaviour change that lasts
Who you will work with

Two principals. One standard.

Donovan Learning pairs practitioner depth with academic rigour. Every engagement is led personally by Aoife Donovan Lee and Paul Donovan, so the people who diagnose your leadership challenge are the same people who work it through with your leaders.

Coaching

Principal · Executive Coach

Aoife Donovan Lee

High-performance leadership. Built to last.

Twenty years across coaching, leadership development, learning and organisational development, with a particular focus on high-performance leadership and building emotional intelligence. Her coaching is direct, warm and grounded in evidence: leaders leave sessions with something to do, not just something to think about.

MSc Psychology · Korn Ferry Leadership Architect · Emotional Capital Report · ECR360

Development

Principal · Executive Coach · Adjunct Associate Professor

Paul Donovan

Behaviour change that outlasts the programme.

Two decades as a management development consultant, drawing on a career as a practitioner in operations and human resources. His research and teaching focus on learning transfer: the difference between development that is enjoyed and development that changes behaviour.

Trinity College Dublin · Maynooth University, Emeritus · Doctorate, Management Learning · Former Head of Management Development, IMI

Meet the principals

Trusted by organisations including

Mercury Engineering
Trinity Business School
eBay
Vodafone
Maynooth University
Lam Partnership
Department of Defence
The problems we are asked to solve

Are you seeing this in your leaders?

These are the patterns HR Directors, CEOs and leadership teams bring to us most often. Each links to a practical guide you can put to work straight away.

Unable to Delegate

They are still doing the work they were promoted out of. Everything routes through them, the team stays junior, and the leader becomes a bottleneck nobody wants to name.

Poor Time Management

Full diaries, unclear priorities. The urgent keeps beating the important, and the work only they can do slips to next quarter again.

Lack of Strategic Thinking

Capable operators who cannot lift their heads. They solve this week brilliantly, then struggle to say where the function needs to be in two years.

Developing People

Feedback gets softened, difficult conversations get postponed, strong performers quietly leave. The pipeline thins because nobody is being stretched.

Leadership Presence

They know their subject and still lose the room. In front of a board or a sceptical audience, the credibility does not travel.

Building a Team

A group of individuals rather than a leadership team. Roles blur, accountability drifts, and alignment lasts only as long as the last meeting.

How we help

Four disciplines. One connected practice.

Each service stands on its own, and they are designed to work together: assessment sharpens coaching, coaching deepens development, facilitation turns individual growth into team performance.

Executive Coaching

Confidential one-to-one coaching for CEOs, executives, founders and senior leaders facing significant leadership challenges: strategy, presence, delegation, difficult conversations, resilience.

For individual senior leaders

Leadership Development

Tailored programmes from graduate and emerging-leader level through to senior teams, designed from your organisation's real challenges rather than delivered from a catalogue.

For organisations and cohorts

Workshops & Facilitation

Leadership offsites, strategic planning, role clarity and accountability sessions that move leadership teams from operational firefighting to strategic focus.

For leadership teams

Leadership Assessments

Korn Ferry Leadership Architect, the Emotional Capital Report and ECR360, used to sharpen development with evidence rather than opinion.

Woven through every service
How we work

Diagnose. Design. Develop. Deepen.

Stage one

Diagnose

We start with the business problem, not the programme. Conversations with sponsors and leaders, and assessment where useful, so we treat the cause rather than the symptom.

Stage two

Design

Development built for your context: your leaders, your culture, your commercial reality. No off-the-shelf content presented as bespoke.

Stage three

Develop

Coaching, workshops and facilitation delivered by the principals, built around practice and application, not theory alone.

Stage four

Deepen Lasting change

Reinforcement, manager involvement and follow-through, so behaviour holds after the programme ends rather than fading when we leave.

The shift we create

From where leaders are, to where the business needs them.

Where many teams start

  • Leaders buried in the weeds, strategy perpetually postponed
  • Difficult conversations avoided, accountability drifting
  • Everything depending on one or two individuals
  • Technically brilliant managers without leadership capability
  • Success sustained only by pressure, hours and goodwill

Where our clients get to

  • Leaders working on the business, with real strategic focus
  • Clear roles, honest conversations, accountability that holds
  • Capability spread across the team, not concentrated in one person
  • Confident managers with genuine leadership range
  • Ambitious results achieved sustainably, without burnout as the price
What you can expect

Outcomes, not just programmes.

Stronger leadership pipelines

Graduates, emerging leaders and first-time managers who are ready before the role demands it.

Greater strategic focus

Leadership teams that spend their time on direction and decisions, not operational firefighting.

Effective delegation

Work sitting at the right level, with leaders freed for the work only they can do.

Accountability that holds

Clear roles and responsibilities, honest performance conversations, follow-through as a habit.

Higher emotional intelligence

Leaders who read the room, manage themselves under pressure and bring people with them.

Sustainable performance

Ambitious results without excessive hours, constant pressure or burnout as the operating model.

Recent work

The calibre of the work.

A sample of recent engagements, anonymised pending client approval.

Engineering · Graduate development

Building the next generation of leaders at scale

A multi-year graduate leadership programme for a major engineering contractor, developing around ninety graduates in adaptive mindsets, stakeholder management, emotional intelligence, communication, personal brand and multi-generational working.

Cohort programme · ~90 participants
Technology · Facilitation

Leadership offsite and strategic planning

Design and facilitation of a leadership offsite for an enterprise software organisation, moving the team from operational review to genuine strategic planning with clear ownership of the priorities agreed.

Senior leadership team · Offsite facilitation
Investment · CEO alignment

Aligning portfolio CEOs around shared priorities

Facilitation with CEOs from across an investment group's portfolio companies, aligning leadership around business priorities and longer-term goals while respecting the independence of each business.

Portfolio CEO group · Multi-session facilitation
What clients say

In their words.

The programme did not feel like training. It felt like someone had understood our business, our pressures and our people, and built something for exactly that.
Head of Learning & Development, engineering sector
Six months on, the behaviour has held. Our leadership team runs its own agenda now, and I am no longer the bottleneck for every decision.
Managing Director, technology sector
Aoife created the conditions for a conversation our leadership team had been avoiding for two years. We left with clarity, and it stuck.
Chief Executive, professional services
The coaching was challenging in the best sense. I think differently about my role, and the people around me have noticed the difference.
Executive coaching client, senior leader
Common questions

Before you get in touch.

Who do you typically work with?

Organisations, leadership teams and individual senior leaders. Typical buyers include HR Directors, Heads of Learning and Development, CEOs and Managing Directors commissioning programmes, coaching, facilitation or assessment, alongside senior professionals who engage us directly for executive coaching.

What does an engagement usually look like?

Every engagement follows our four-stage approach: Diagnose, Design, Develop, Deepen. Coaching typically runs six to nine sessions over four to eight months. Programmes and facilitation are scoped to your context after an initial conversation, which carries no obligation.

Do you use assessments, and are they mandatory?

We are accredited in the Korn Ferry Leadership Architect, the Emotional Capital Report and ECR360, and we use them where they sharpen the work. They are a tool, not a toll: nothing is mandatory, and we will recommend assessment only where it adds genuine value.

Where do you work?

We are based in Ireland and work with organisations across Ireland, the United Kingdom and Europe, in person and remotely. Coaching is delivered in person or online, whichever serves the leader best.

How do we start?

With a conversation. Tell us what you are seeing in your leaders or your team, and we will give you an honest view on whether and how we can help. If we are not the right fit, we will say so.

Start the conversation

Ready to develop better leaders?

Tell us what you are seeing in your organisation. An initial conversation costs nothing and carries no obligation, and you will leave it with a clearer view either way.

Arrange a Conversation hello@donovanlearning.com
How we help

Coaching, development, facilitation and assessment.

Four disciplines that work on their own and better together. Every engagement starts from your actual leadership challenge, follows Diagnose, Design, Develop, Deepen, and is led personally by the principals.

Executive coaching

Confidential coaching for leaders carrying real weight.

One-to-one coaching for CEOs, executives, founders, business owners and high-potential leaders facing significant leadership challenges. Typically six to nine sessions over four to eight months, in person or online, with complete confidentiality.

[Placeholder: coaching section copy from Aoife to be inserted here before launch.]

  • Strategic thinking and moving out of the operational weeds
  • Delegation, executive presence and confidence
  • Difficult conversations and stakeholder management
  • Emotional intelligence, resilience and leadership under pressure
  • Sustainable performance without burnout as the price of ambition
Discuss coaching
Placeholder: Aoife in coaching conversation
Leadership development

Programmes built from your challenges, not our catalogue.

Tailored leadership development for every level: graduates, emerging leaders, first-time managers, experienced managers, senior leaders and full leadership teams. Designed from a diagnosis of your organisation's real challenges, and built to translate into changed behaviour, not just good feedback scores.

Adaptive mindsetsEmotional intelligenceStakeholder managementCoaching skillsDifficult conversationsExecutive presenceStrategic leadershipResilienceIntergenerational workingHigh-performing teams
Explore a programme
Placeholder: workshop cohort in session
Workshops & facilitation

Offsites and sessions that produce decisions, not just discussion.

Leadership team offsites, strategic planning, team alignment and accountability sessions. We design and facilitate the conversations leadership teams find hardest to have on their own, and make sure the outputs survive contact with Monday morning.

  • Strategic planning and moving from operational to strategic thinking
  • Role clarity, RACI and accountability that holds
  • Decision-making and leadership team effectiveness
  • Reducing dependency on individual leaders
Plan a session
Placeholder: leadership offsite facilitation
Leadership assessments

Evidence, so development starts from truth rather than opinion.

We are accredited practitioners in three established assessment tools, used to sharpen coaching and development where they add genuine value: never as an end in themselves.

  • Korn Ferry Leadership Architect. A research-based library of leadership competencies for defining and developing what good looks like in your context.
  • Emotional Capital Report. A validated measure of the emotional intelligence competencies that drive leadership performance.
  • ECR360. The 360-degree view: how a leader's emotional intelligence is experienced by the people around them.
Ask about assessment
Placeholder: assessment debrief visual

Not sure which service fits?

That is normal, and it is exactly what the first conversation is for. Tell us the problem; we will recommend the shape of the work, or tell you honestly if we are not the right fit.

Arrange a Conversation
Our approach

Sustainable high performance, taken seriously.

We believe leaders should be capable of ambitious results without success requiring constant pressure, excessive hours or burnout. That is not a wellbeing slogan. It is a performance standard, and it shapes how every engagement is designed.

What we believe

Development should change behaviour, or it should not happen.

Most leadership development fails quietly. The programme is enjoyed, the feedback is positive, and six months later nothing has changed. We design against that outcome from the first conversation, which is why our four stages end with Deepen rather than delivery: reinforcement, manager involvement and follow-through are part of the work, not an optional extra.

We also believe evidence beats opinion. Where it helps, we use the Korn Ferry Leadership Architect, the Emotional Capital Report and ECR360 to ground development in data, so leaders work on what actually matters rather than what feels comfortable.

And we believe in honesty over scale. Donovan Learning is deliberately a two-principal practice: the people who scope your engagement are the people who deliver it. If we are not the right fit for what you need, we will tell you, and where we can, point you towards someone who is.

The principles behind the practice

Four commitments we make to every client.

Diagnosis before design

We will not propose a programme until we understand the problem. Sometimes the answer is smaller than you expected; occasionally it is not development at all.

Principals, not associates

The people you meet in the first conversation are the people in the room with your leaders. Nothing is subcontracted.

Built for your context

Your sector, your culture, your commercial pressures. Off-the-shelf content is never presented as bespoke.

Judged on what holds

We measure success by the behaviour still visible months after we leave, not by the feedback form on the day.

See how this works in practice.

Explore the four services, or start with a conversation about what you are seeing in your leaders.

Explore How We Help Arrange a Conversation
About Donovan Learning

Practitioner depth. Academic rigour. One practice.

Donovan Learning is led by two principals whose careers cover the full span of leadership development: from the coaching room and the boardroom to the business school and the research literature.

Aoife Donovan Lee

Principal · Executive Coach · Leadership Development Specialist

Aoife is a leadership learning and development specialist with expertise in high-performance leadership and building emotional intelligence. Over more than twenty years, she has helped leaders and organisations perform better across coaching, learning and organisational development. Her work spans one-to-one coaching with CEOs and senior executives, the design and delivery of leadership programmes from graduate to senior team level, and the facilitation of leadership offsites and strategic planning sessions.

She holds an MSc in Psychology and executive coaching qualifications, and is an accredited practitioner in the Korn Ferry Leadership Architect, the Emotional Capital Report and ECR360. Her coaching is direct, warm and grounded in evidence: leaders leave sessions with something to do, not just something to think about.

MSc PsychologyExecutive coaching qualificationsKorn Ferry Leadership ArchitectECR & ECR360 Practitioner

Paul Donovan

Principal · Executive Coach · Adjunct Associate Professor of Management

Paul's expertise in coaching and developing managers is borne out of a distinguished career as a practitioner in operations and human resources, and two decades of work as a management development consultant. He is Adjunct Associate Professor of Management at Trinity College Dublin and Emeritus at Maynooth University, with a doctorate in management learning. He was previously Head of Management Development at the Irish Management Institute, where he worked with many of Ireland's leading organisations on how managers actually learn and change.

His research and teaching focus on learning transfer: the difference between development that is enjoyed and development that changes behaviour. That evidence base runs directly through the design of every Donovan Learning programme, and it is why the practice is judged on what holds, not on what is delivered.

Trinity College DublinMaynooth University, EmeritusDoctorate, Management LearningFormer Head of Management Development, IMI
Looking ahead

A practice built to grow with its clients.

Alongside coaching, development, facilitation and assessment, Donovan Learning is developing online leadership learning to extend the reach of the work. It is in development now, and consultancy clients will be the first to know when it launches.

Work with the principals directly.

No account managers, no hand-offs. Just two experienced practitioners and your leadership challenge.

Arrange a Conversation
Insights

Thinking on leadership that you can use.

Practical writing on the leadership challenges we see most often, plus our library of free leadership guides.

GROW
Executive coaching

GROW: the coaching framework that grew up.

A model devised for tennis coaches keeps outlasting every framework it inspired. The most useful place to point it is at your own thinking, not your team's.

Aoife Donovan Lee6 min read
Leadership development

The accidental leader: promoted for skill, unprepared for role.

The people you promoted because they were the best at the job now need help doing a very different one. Very little in their previous work has prepared them for it.

Paul Donovan5 min read
Difficult conversations

Silence is a decision.

Why capable senior leaders avoid the conversations that would change everything, what silence costs the team around them, and a simple structure for having those conversations well.

Aoife Donovan Lee5 min read
Free leadership guides

Practical guides for the six challenges we see most.

Each guide covers the warning signs, why the pattern happens, six practical recommendations, reflection questions and a thirty-day plan.

Unable to Delegate

Break the bottleneck and move work to the right level.

Poor Time Management

Stop the urgent beating the important, week after week.

Lack of Strategic Thinking

Lift capable operators out of the weeds for good.

Developing People

Honest feedback, real stretch, a pipeline that fills itself.

Leadership Presence

Carry credibility into the rooms where it counts.

Building a Team

Turn a group of individuals into a leadership team.

Contact

Start with a conversation.

Tell us what you are seeing in your leaders, your team or yourself. We will come back within two working days with an honest view on whether and how we can help.

Talk to us directly.

Prefer email or a call? Every enquiry comes straight to the principals.

Emailhello@donovanlearning.com
LocationIreland · working across Ireland, the UK and Europe
Response timeWithin two working days
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Donovan Learning

break the mould.
become the better you.

Developing better leaders and stronger leadership teams through coaching, tailored programmes, facilitation and assessment. Based in Ireland, working internationally.

How we help

  • Executive Coaching
  • Leadership Development
  • Workshops & Facilitation
  • Leadership Assessments

Company

  • Our Approach
  • About the Principals
  • Insights & Guides
  • Contact

Get in touch

  • hello@donovanlearning.com
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