Who am I?
I’m a Sydney-based leadership consultant and executive coach working with managers and SME founders to strengthen accountability, leadership habits, and inner capability for sustainable business growth.
I began my career in law at twenty-two, young, ambitious, and certain that hard work and honesty would be enough. Within six months, that belief was shattered.
I discovered a world where truth was inconvenient, authenticity was punished, and success required you to detach from who you are. The cost of “fitting in” was cutting away the very parts of me that made me human: my sensitivity, integrity, intuition, and desire to do meaningful work.
That shock became the beginning of my inner awakening.
I realised this early:
If you want a life or career that feels true, you cannot build it on a false version of yourself.
So I walked away to understand my mission in this life.
To ask better questions.
To rebuild from the inside out.
That decision began a twenty-year journey across countries, careers, and disciplines, from law to investment banking to corporate leadership in organisation development and effectiveness, to SME advisory, to running my own business, and ultimately to helping organisations strengthen their people, capability, and scale-up systems.
Across these decades, one truth followed me everywhere:
People aren’t struggling because they are not smart or hardworking.
They are struggling because their inner operating system hasn’t been upgraded.
Throughout my career, I’ve witnessed a recurring tragedy: brilliant, driven people who rise to incredible heights, only to collapse under the weight of their own success. I’ve seen that the higher the rise, the more devastating the fall.
I am obsessed with the difference between a 'peak' and a 'plateau.'
For decades, I have been driven by one question: What infrastructure is required to ensure your hard work actually lasts?
My mission, the thing that gets me out of bed every morning, is building Inner-Edge Capability for individuals and Human Systems for businesses. These are the internal conditions we must intentionally cultivate to ensure that high performance is not just a moment in time, but a sustainable way of living.
Whether you’re a driven professional seeking clarity and influence, a leader navigating complexity, or a founder building a business that must grow beyond you, I’m here to support your next chapter.
If you have ever wondered:
Why does execution break down as teams grow?”
“What causes reactive management?”
“What is inner capability in leadership?
Where My Work Comes From
My approach isn’t theoretical. It’s the result of two decades of learning, unlearning, and rebuilding my understanding of how humans and systems truly grow.
My pool of knowledge and experience comes from three pillars:
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A foundation shaped by law, business, organisational development, leadership, coaching, behavioural science, and human systems.
This includes postgraduate study, continuous professional training, and specialised certification across capability development, neuroscience-informed leadership, psychosocial safety, and organisational effectiveness.iption text goes here
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My professional path has taken me through a rare mix of environments, each teaching me something different about human performance and organisational growth:
Law: where I learned how systems, rules, and human behaviour collide.
Financial start-ups & investment banking: fast, high-stakes environments demanding clarity, execution, and emotional steadiness.
Commercial banking: complex operations, organisational pressure, and the realities of scaling people systems.
Fortune 100 & Fortune 50 organisations: eading learning, leadership development, OD, and organisational effectiveness initiatives, shaping the capability of managers and executives.
Start-ups & SMEs: where gaps in capability, culture, and execution become visible immediately, and where I learned how to build systems that actually work in real life, not just on paper.
Advisory & Consulting: coaching founders, successor leaders, operational managers, and corporate teams to strengthen their inner capability, align behaviours, and scale with maturity.
This breadth gives me a vantage point most practitioners never get:
I’ve seen what breaks people in high pressure.
I’ve seen what matures leaders.
And I’ve seen that the strongest systems in any industry, always start inside the human being. -
The insights that textbooks don’t teach, navigating cultural complexity as a migrant professional, rebuilding my own inner system after burnout, and helping leaders shift long-held patterns that traditional training never touches.
It’s the lived, tested, embodied understanding of how change actually happens, not how we wish it would.
So, Why I Do What I Do?
Success is easy to achieve, but incredibly difficult to sustain!
I am obsessed with a specific phenomenon: why brilliant leaders rise to the top only to collapse, and why ambitious companies attract top talent only to see them plateau.
Over 20 years, I’ve realised that business failure is rarely a lack of strategy. It is a failure of the Inner Conditions. I do what I do because I refuse to accept the 'Industry Standard' where:
Founders carry the weight of a $20M business on a $1M nervous system.
Performance is achieved through sheer force of will rather than scalable human systems.
Scale becomes a trap that breaks the very people who engineered the growth.
My Mission is quite simple: Building the Architecture of Resilience. I don't just 'coach'; I re-engineer the Human Operating System at two critical levels:
The Individual OS: Upgrading your internal clarity, emotional capacity, and self-leadership so your 'inner hardware' can handle the heat of high-stakes growth.
The Business OS: Designing the rhythms, decision paths, and cultural expectations that turn operational chaos into frictionless momentum.
Chaos is just raw material. My work is to build the patterns that transform that chaos into Sustainable Power. I protect the soul of the organisation, ensuring the business rises without breaking the people who carry it.
INDIVIDUAL
Management & Leadership training
Private Coaching & Mentoring
Inner-Edge Upgrade Circle
Organisation
Coaching & Mentoring
Management & Leadership Programs
Capability Development Framework
Scale-Up Advisory & Peer Advisory
Free Resources that could be useful for you
Featured in Media
How to Work with Me
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Coach/mentor by me
I support purpose-driven, ambitious professionals to grow their clarity, confidence, and influence by strengthening their Inner Operational System.
My coaching blends evidence-based practices, neuroscience insights, and practical tools that help you lead yourself and others with greater ease.
Together, we develop the mindset, emotional agility, and habits that enable you to achieve more impact with less stress, and build a leadership identity that feels authentic and sustainable.
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Workshop by me
I design and deliver practical, science-based workshops that strengthen leadership capability, communication, and team effectiveness.
Whether the focus is Quality Conversations, Emotional Intelligence, Psychosocial Safety, or Inner-Edge capability, each workshop helps your people build habits that translate learning into real behaviour change.
These sessions are interactive, evidence-informed, and tailored to your organisation’s needs, enabling teams to collaborate better, lead with confidence, and support healthier, more sustainable performance.
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Consulting / Advisory by Me
Every business is a people business, and your ability to scale depends on the strength of your people system. I advise purpose-led SME on strengthening the people systems that enable sustainable scale.
My consulting work focuses on enhancing leadership capabilities, improving team alignment, and instilling cultural and operational rhythms that foster growth. Using the Inner-Edge framework, I help you diagnose capability gaps, build stronger human systems, and create a business that grows without over-relying on the Leaders.
Get in touch
ella@igrowingcapacity.com
(61)412061515
Ella Zhang is the founder and CEO of the Institute of Growing Capacity (iGrow). She is a practical and dynamic facilitator, mentor and trainer whose insight is grounded in over fifteen years of experience as a successful facilitator, strategic coach and specialist in cutting-edge inter-disciplined practices of Positive Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Adult Education.
