Caroline Webb

Caroline Webb is an executive coach, economist, and author, who specializes in helping leaders improve their professional effectiveness by applying insights from behavioral science (neuroscience, psychology, and economics). A former McKinsey partner, Caroline has twice been named as one of the top 50 executive coaches in the world on Thinkers50‘s ‘Coaches50’ list, and one of the Top 50 Leadership and Management Experts by Inc. magazine.

She is the author of the new bestseller Leadership Intelligence: Science-Backed Strategies for Mastering 21 Everyday Management Challenges, which argues that in the era of AI, the leaders who stand out will be those who develop their distinctly human strengths. Her first book – How to Have a Good Day: Harness the Power of Behavioral Science to Transform Your Working Life – was a global bestseller that has been published in 18 editions and over 60 countries. It was hailed by Fortune as a top “self-improvement through data” book, by Forbes as one a “must-read business book,” and by Inc magazine as one of the “best 15 leadership and personal development books of the past five years.”

Caroline is currently a Senior Advisor on leadership to McKinsey, where she was previously a partner. During her 12 years at McKinsey & Company, Caroline specialized in helping leaders achieve transformational change in their organizations and teams. She co-founded McKinsey’s leadership practice, designed the firm’s approach to transforming top team dynamics, led the firm’s work on organizational effectiveness in the healthcare sector, and drove the expansion of the firm’s work on personal leadership effectiveness. She also founded and remains faculty of McKinsey’s flagship leadership development course for senior female executives.

Before that, Caroline spent the 1990s working in public policy as an economist at the UK’s central bank, the Bank of England. Her work there included working closely with the Monetary Policy Committee as author of the Inflation Report, global economic forecasting, and institution-building in post-communist Europe.

Caroline has been a frequent contributor to Harvard Business Review, and her work appears in HBR Guide to Being More Productive and HBR Guide to Dealing With Conflict. She contributed two chapters to the Silicon Guild/Thinkers50 anthology on leadership, Leading for Tomorrow. She has also written on behavioral change topics for the World Economic Forum, Fast Company, Quartz at Work, Business Insider, Psychology Today, Behavioral Scientist, and WIRED. Her work has been widely featured in the media, including in The Economist, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Fortune, Forbes, Inc., and BBC Radio. She is on the Advisory Boards of Ethical Systems and the Constructive Dialogue Institute, two non-profit organizations dedicated to improving the quality of discourse and behavior in business and education. She is also one of Marshall Goldsmith’s 100 Coaches. Caroline’s book is a core text for Professor Jonathan Haidt’s ‘Work, Wisdom & Happiness’ course at NYU Stern School of Business, and she has also guest lectured at Harvard, Chicago Booth, Columbia Business School, London School of Economics and London Business School on applications of behavioral science to leadership and workplace effectiveness. Caroline is originally from the UK, and has degrees in economics from Cambridge and Oxford Universities. She is based in New York but travels widely to coach clients and deliver keynote speeches.