Heather Cairns-Lee
Heather Cairns-Lee is Affiliate Professor of Leadership and Communication. Her award-winning research and teaching focus on sensemaking in leaders and organizations, collaboration, authentic and effective communication and the creation of diverse, caring and inclusive cultures. She works to develop reflective and responsible leaders at all levels of organizations from early career to top teams.
Cairns-Lee is an expert on Clean Language and its role in creating authentic communication. With her co-editors she has published a ground-breaking book on Clean Language Interviewing to provide insights into how language can be used most effectively to understand people’s lived and unique experience. This respectful form of communication is important in an increasingly diverse world in which leaders need to understand different perspectives to create inclusive environments.
Leadership is a collective quest involving sensemaking of uncertainty, providing direction, and creating the conditions for people to connect, co-create, and commit to a shared vision – which requires clarity of purpose, clean communication, and a collaborative mindset.
Highly skillful in group dynamics and an experienced C-suite and top team coach, Cairns-Lee has contributed to the design and delivery of IMD’s flagship depth leadership programs including the MBA leadership stream, Strategies for Leadership for women leaders and Mobilizing People. She has worked with numerous companies including ABB, Adecco, BASF, Generali, OCP, Swisscom and UEFA on leadership development initiatives. She runs deep dive processes with management teams to enhance collaborative processes for the creation and implementation of strategic issues and the exploration of team dynamics.
Cairns-Lee’s research focuses on learning and leadership including the development of self-awareness, authenticity and sensemaking. She has a particular interest in language, the pivotal role of questions and the importance of metaphor in break-through thinking and creativity. Her research has been published in The Journal for Applied Behavioral Science, Advances in Developing Human Resources and Harvard Business Review.org as well as in a series of books by Edward Elgar on Research Methodologies in Creativity and Intuition.
Believing that leaders learn best from experience – their own and that of others – she engages executives using experiential learning that requires decision-making, exploration of group dynamics and focused reflection before application to their own context. She supports executives to explore diverse and difficult issues through the cases she writes about real business situations. Topics include leadership transitions, entrepreneurial and growth-mindset, the potential, and pitfalls of post-merger integration, driving transparency in sustainability and organizational transformation to create sustainable growth. In 2024, she joined The Case Centre’s Board of Trustees.
An experienced and ICF certified executive coach, she has supported the growth of thousands of leaders and managers across the globe. She selectively coaches top teams and C-Suite executives plus individuals in Non-Governmental Organizations to enhance their leadership capacity.
Cairns-Lee is a keen advocate for gender equality and a member of IMD’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Council. She is committed to empowering gender equality and is past President of Business Professional Women, Lake Geneva. This is part of an influential world-wide network from over 100 countries with consultative status at the United Nations with the mission to develop the leadership potential of women. She also aims to reduce the metaphorical ‘leaky pipeline’ by supporting girls to stay in sport and STEM through her volunteer work.
Cairns-Lee has a played a longstanding role in the development of management education. To encourage peer exchange in a learning community, she was a founding member of the Research and Benchmarking Committees of UNICON – the consortium of leading business schools. Her early-career work with EQUIS established quality standards in executive education through its review and accreditation system. At IMD, she successfully shaped and led the partnership program business and articulated the design principles for the co-creation of effective leadership development. She led the Learning Network of 140 companies through its early stages of digitization.
