Dr. Alaina Chipman Leeks
I work on the part
nobody says out loud.
Executive leadership coaching for principals, executive directors and founders. The work is the part of the job the description left out: what is actually happening, what hasn't been said, and what an organization quietly decides in the absence of it.
The premise
Most coaching starts at the organization and works inward. I start at the person.
How you were formed shapes how you lead, and how you lead shapes what your organization becomes. Work that order backwards and you get a strategy nobody executes. Work it forwards and the strategy tends to take care of itself.
How the work goes
Make sense. Make meaning. Make moves.
What is actually happening here?
Not what should be happening. Not the version you've been telling your board. My doctoral research is in organizational sensemaking, and this is where it earns its keep. We build an account of the situation that's accurate before it's comfortable.
What does it mean, for you and for them?
Leaders skip this step constantly, and it's why their plans don't hold. A decision only travels as far as the shared understanding underneath it. Part of your job is helping other people build that understanding, and most leaders were never taught how.
What will you do before we meet again?
Decisions, conversations, structures. Every session ends with something specific you're going to do, and the next one starts with what happened when you did it.
Who I work with
People carrying something heavier than their title suggests.
- Principals new to the role, and successor leaders stepping in behind someone who left a long shadow
- Executive directors and business founders, including the ones who built the thing and now have to run it
- HR and people leaders, who are asked to hold a whole system accountable and are almost never developed themselves
- Leaders whose team knows something is wrong but hasn't found a way to say it
- Working mothers running an organization and a household, without calling it balance
How engagements are shaped
Long enough to change something. Structured enough to be held to it.
There are no prices on this page, and that's deliberate. Scope comes before cost, always, and I would rather understand what you're actually dealing with than hand you a number that turns out to be for the wrong thing.
What I can tell you is exactly what the work looks like, so you know what you would be committing to before we ever discuss money.
- One to oneA school year or a calendar year, because a leader doesn't change in six weeks. We meet once or twice a month depending on what you're carrying, and at least once I come to you and see the building rather than the version of it that fits in a video call.
- A leadership teamThe same work with the people around you, which is harder and usually more useful. Most executive problems aren't one person's to fix, and coaching only the person at the top can leave them more isolated than when we started.
- A cohortEight to twelve leaders in the same role or the same system, working in parallel. Peers who are living the same week are worth more than any facilitator, and my job is mostly to make it safe enough for them to be honest with each other.
- A single session or a talkFor teams and audiences, on leadership, on founding and scaling, or on the parts of a life people keep quiet. Bounded, and useful on its own.
The first ninety days
Mostly, at the start, we're working out what is actually true.
- Weeks one to four. An accurate account.Not the version in the board report. What is really happening, what you've stopped noticing, and where your read and everyone else's have quietly come apart. This takes longer than people expect and skipping it's why most coaching produces a nice relationship and no change.
- Weeks five to eight. What it means.For you, and for the people who have to act on it. This is where we work out what only you can decide, what you've been carrying that belongs to someone else, and what your team currently believes that's not true.
- Weeks nine to twelve. The first moves, and a way to tell.Decisions made, conversations actually had, structures changed. Along with something you can point at in six months to say whether it worked, because a feeling of progress isn't progress.
Between sessions, and how it starts
Every session ends with something specific you're going to do before we meet again, and the next one opens with what happened when you did it. That's the whole accountability structure, and it's not optional.
After each session you get written notes and a follow-up, so the work doesn't live only in your memory or mine. Between sessions you can reach me. Not for everything, but a hard conversation you have to have on Thursday shouldn't have to wait until the fourteenth.
Every engagement opens the same way. A letter, an intake that asks you real questions rather than administrative ones, and a deadline for answering it. Then the whole year's calendar is built from what you send back, before we begin, so the time is protected instead of negotiated month by month.
I already hold one week of every month for coaching. That's the practical constraint worth knowing early, because it means I take on a small number of people and I would rather tell you I'm full than do it badly.
Founders, starting and scaling
Starting is one skill. Scaling is a different one, and most founders find that out late.
I speak to and advise business founders on the question underneath most growth decisions. Not how to start, which plenty of people will tell you, but when to grow, what has to be true before you do, and what breaks first if you do it anyway.
This is also what I studied. My doctoral capstone was an ethnographic study of how the people inside a small Black owned management company in Atlanta made sense of scaling: what they believed the risks were, where their accounts of the business diverged from one another, and what actually had to change before growth was survivable. The research sits inside a real gap. Fewer than one percent of small businesses in the United States are Black owned businesses that employ other people.
I've also done it rather than only studied it. I built an organization from nothing and scaled it, which means I know which of these conversations are uncomfortable and why founders put them off.
- Do you have a business, or a job you invented for yourself?The first honest question, and the one most founders skip.
- When to scale, and what has to be true firstThe conditions that have to hold before growth stops being a risk you can't absorb.
- Hiring for the company you're becomingThe single finding that came through hardest in the research: scaling succeeds or fails on who you bring in.
- What founders avoid saying out loudMoney, control, succession, and what happens to the vision when it stops being only yours.
Before we start
It's worth being plain about what this isn't.
This isn't life coaching. It's not therapy. It's not professional development, and it's not an inspirational quote with an invoice attached.
I won't spend a session asking how that makes you feel. I'll ask what you actually want, what you're avoiding, what you've decided to tolerate, and what you're going to do about it before we speak again.
Some people find that a relief. Some people find it a lot. It's worth knowing which one you are before we begin, and I would rather you find out now than four sessions in.
What I'm not trying to do is produce leaders who lead like me. The work is finding your own voice and leading in a way that's actually yours.
About
Dr. Alaina Chipman Leeks
I started as a special education teacher in Brooklyn and became an assistant principal, an instructional coach, and then a principal, including as the successor leader of a failing New York City school that we turned around.
I founded Atlanta Unbound Academy, a free public charter school drawing on the legacy of the HBCUs, and I've led it since it opened in 2020. So when I sit with a founder or a principal, I'm not working from theory. I've made most of these mistakes with my own name on the building.
Alongside the coaching I speak to business founders about starting and scaling, which is the subject my doctoral research was built on, and to audiences about fertility, surrogacy and the parts of a life people keep quiet.
That's also why I coach the way I do. I'm open about what I've gotten wrong, because leaders learn far more from a candid account of a failure than from a tidy account of a success. A transparent teacher, and still a student.
- DoctorateVanderbilt University, Peabody College. Organizational Leadership. My research was in organizational sensemaking, applied to how small companies make sense of scaling.
- DegreesNew York University, MA. Spelman College, BA in Child Development.
- LeadingFounder and CEO, Atlanta Unbound Academy, a K through 8 public charter school in Atlanta. Raised multimillion dollar philanthropic and public funding to found and grow it, and manages a multimillion dollar annual operating budget.
- RecognitionAspen Institute, Pahara Fellow. Government of The Bahamas, Top 40 Under 40 Promising Bahamians. Atlanta Business Chronicle, 40 Under 40. Brooklyn Nets, Amtrak Pioneer Award. Yass Prize Quarterfinalist. Charter School Growth Fund Seed Cohort. redefinED. Walton Family Foundation.
- PartnershipMorehouse School of Medicine, USHA program, introducing middle school students to careers in the sciences.
- CoachingEighth year coaching executive directors. Fourth year coaching school leaders in Michigan.
Vulnerability is a leadership skill
I honor the person who shows up in the role, not the role the person showed up in.
The person is supposed to shape the role. Most of the time we do it backwards and let the role shape the person, and what you get is a leader performing the outline of a job instead of doing it. Almost nobody was taught otherwise.
An organization can only make sense of what someone is willing to say out loud. That's not a feeling, it's a mechanism. When the person in charge can't name what is actually happening, the team builds its account out of guesses, and every decision after that rests on the guess. I've watched it happen from the outside and I've caused it from the inside.
I caused it while building one. I wrote the charter application for the school I now lead while recovering from a liver resection. I filed grant applications from a hospital bed and did a funder interview on video from it. From the outside that reads as strength. I was performing, and I was good enough at it that nobody asked.
So that's what I listen for now, and not for its own sake. Every person under a leader is making decisions based on what that leader has said is true. When the leader is performing, the entire organization is running on a description that doesn't match the building, and you can't fix a system with a wrong picture of it. That's why the personal part isn't a detour from the strategy. It's the input to it.
I wrote about my own version of this, which is why there's a memoir on a coaching website. I'm not asking you to write one, and I'm not going to ask you how anything made you feel. I'm going to ask what is actually happening, what you haven't said out loud, and what you're going to do about it before we meet again.
The book
The first time I truly met my children, they were behind glass.
Mia had an IV in her scalp. David was the color of a bruise. I stood in a paper gown with hands scrubbed raw, smelling like antiseptic and fear, and whispered the only thing I could think to say. Can I touch them?
Some stories are too big to carry quietly. This is the memoir for the woman who has been performing strength so long she has forgotten what it feels like to set it down. Eleven chapters on infertility, IVF, surrogacy, the NICU, a marriage held together through medical trauma, and a faith that didn't come through any of it unchanged.
I didn't write it as an expert. I wrote it because silence almost swallowed me, and I don't want that for you.
You know her. You might be her.
The one who hasn't said any of this out loud.
- The one doing her IVF injections in a lounge bathroom while she shows up for everyone else's celebration
- The one who can't explain her surrogacy journey at brunch
- The one holding a marriage together through medical trauma while two careers refuse to slow down
- The one rebuilding her faith from the inside out
You are not making it up. You are not behind.
Written to sit beside it
For the people in the middle of it, not looking back on it.
- The Parts We Don't Say Out LoudA workbook in six sections, for the questions you answer alone first.
- The Quiet Between PrayersA prayer journal, with room for the prayer you've never said out loud.
- Prayers for the Quiet PartsTen cards written for waiting rooms, lab draws, and two in the morning.
- Talk With MeFifty two conversation cards, for the couples who can't find the words.
Before it's out
I'll send you one scene, and ten questions.
The scene is the first time I met my children. The ten questions come from Talk With Me, for the conversation you've been avoiding. Both are yours now, before the book is anywhere.
You will also be the first to know when it's real.
One email to confirm, then it's yours. I don't send often.
Still Faithful. Still Becoming.
Follow along at @bainalaina.
Get in touch
Tell me what is actually happening.
Not the tidy version. The real one. If it sounds like work I can help with, I'll say so. If it doesn't, I'll tell you that too, and try to point you somewhere different.