Anna brings a unique set of expertise and experience which means she can adapt and support in a wide range of circumstances and customize to her clients’ needs.
Here is a flavour of the breadth of experience that Anna has developed in her own career:
- Experience across People Operations, Human Resources Functions and Organizational Development Centers of Excellence
Anna has held Human Resource and Learning & Development Business Partner roles directly supporting directors and country leaders in multiple countries across Asia. She also has experience in developing frameworks and advising HR professionals in Centers of Expertise type roles in the areas of organizational development, internal coaching and talent management. In addition, Anna brings expertise in change management having held the role of Program Office Manager for a large multi-million-dollar change program overseeing resource & budget management as well as board-level reporting. She also brings hands on experience of designing, delivering and facilitating workshops such as leadership team offsites, leadership development centers, programs and workshops.
- VP Board experience, Function Head, Manager roles and independent business consultancy owner
Anna has held the role of Vice President of the British Chamber of Commerce in Japan, worked in roles as Head of function such as Learning & Development and Partnership Development. Although the majority of her career has been in permanent employee roles she has also chosen contract and independent roles depending on where she has felt she can add the most value and make the biggest difference. For example, in coaching she has experience as both an external and internal coach, and as such, brings a good understanding of the advantages of each approach.
- Multicultural expertise across a broad spectrum of cultures and contexts
Anna is fluent in Japanese but has worked with leaders and teams in the US, UK, Germany and countries in Asia including Japan, Korea, India, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia and Greater China.
Anna’s education also reflects another aspect of her multicultural background as she holds Masters Degrees from higher educational institutes in Japan, the UK and the US. This means that Anna not only understands the work contexts across different cultures but also the range of different educational contexts that can influence the mindsets and assumptions that individuals bring to a workplace based on their upbringing.
- Coaching leaders to be successful across different cultures & contexts
Anna has supported leaders across a wide range of cultures, and has most most expertise in helping high-performing and high-potential individuals with more “quiet” or understated leadership styles succeed in organizations in which more “extraverted” and self-promoting styles of leadership have been the norm. For example, she has helped such leaders remain authentic and true to their own values while enabling them to further expand and flex their communication styles so that they could be recognized for their critical contributions and ultimately be promoted to more senior and high-impact leadership positions within the organisation or in new organizations.
(If you are interested in looking at culture through different models and frameworks you may also find the work of Andy Molinsky on Global Dexterity Michele Gelfand on tight and loose cultures / contexts or Deborah Tannen’s work on different conversational styles of interest too.*)
- From commercial business in different industries to not-for-profit, academic and governmental
Anna has held most roles in commercial organizations in a range of industries such as retail, technology and finance. Her non-commercial experience ranges from working as a Head of Business Partnership for the British Council in Asia to Visiting Researcher positions in Waseda University’s Institute of Transnational HR Management and Tsukuba University’s Research Center for University Studies. She is also an advisor to the International Center at Tokyo University.
Anna’s career started in Marketing, Sales and business development and she made an intentional career change into organizational and individual development in order to follow her core interests. Her background on understanding the customer needs and on customer communication means she always keeps the business customers and her clients front of mind.
- Experienced speaker and writer
A former Vice President of the British Chamber of Commerce in Japan she has written for the ADT (Association for Talent Development) and has been a keynote speaker on innovative HR practices at CHRO conferences. She has the ability to connect with audiences at formal events as well as engage in other organizational settings such as in the role of career development speaker with university students and facilitator of organizational development initiatives.
- Simplifying useful ideas and concepts into practical tools
Anna is known as a “connector of dots” seeing connections between different models and approaches and condensing them into practical frameworks. You can see some example of simple tools Anna has shared in her publicly available examples here: https://annapinsky.com/other-resources/self-team-development/
* For more context on different cultural models, see Global Dexterity by Andy Molinsky. Article summarizing the key components of the Global Dexterity model here and free self-assessment tool which is useful when joining new teams here
For more details on the work of Michele J. Gelfand and access to a short free quiz on Tight and Loose preferences go to this link: https://www.michelegelfand.com/tl-quiz
Interview with Deborah Tannen which provides interesting examples of differences in conversational styles which occur between native English speakers but are also relevant to differences across cultures (such as length of pause, approach to interrupting, degree of directness etc.): https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/why-conversations-go-wrong
For more details on Anna’s coaching practice, please click on the areas of interest below: