About
Hello, I’m Silke
I am Austrian, though I grew up in a small town near Münster in northern Germany and studied translation and interpreting at Mainz. That training turned out to be the most useful preparation for coaching I could have had. Interpreting teaches you to listen for what a person means rather than what they said, and to hold your own opinions still while someone else is thinking.
After university I went to Paris, then to London in early 2000, then to Singapore in 2018. I now live and work from Koh Samui in Thailand.
Before coaching I spent two decades in senior leadership across Europe and Asia Pacific: customer success and team leadership at LinkedIn, including through the Microsoft acquisition, global programme management with clients including Volkswagen and Zurich Insurance, a year at Standard Chartered, and Head of Customer Success APAC at a global HR technology company. I led teams, carried regional targets, sat through the reorganisations, and made the decisions that keep you awake.
That means the challenges my clients bring are ones I have actually lived: earning trust fast in a new country, managing stakeholders who barely know you, stepping up from delivering the work to shaping it.
And I coach in English, German and French. Fluency that's lived, not studied.
Coaching Credentials and Certifications
CPCC, Co-Active Training Institute. ICF ACC, PCC in progress. 500+ hours. EN, DE, FR.
What it is like to work with me
Warm, direct, and unimpressed by job titles, including my own. I will not fill silences for you. I will ask the question you were hoping I would not ask, and then wait. Clients tell me sessions feel less like being advised and more like finally having room to think.
I am also an aspiring writer. Every fortnight I publish The In-Between, an essay about leaving corporate life and what comes after it. If you want to know how I think before you book anything, start there.