Ailsa Buckley
Ailsa stubbornly ignored the warning that going off to Africa to be volunteer was akin to ‘dropping out’, taking her on a detour that turned into a 34-year+ adventure through the frontlines of international development. Her coaching is shaped by her diverse experiences: it’s reflective, practical, and rooted in practice.
As an ICF-accredited executive coach, Ailsa supports development teams to perform in complex, high pressure, fast-changing environments, and her work is always context-specific, grounded in real challenges and solutions focused. She empowers individuals and teams to take ownership of their learning, decisions, and performance. Her approach blends reflective questioning with practical tools, enabling teams to step back from day-to-day delivery, surface what really matters, and engage in honest, productive dialogue. Her coaching fosters stronger communication, trust, confidence and collaboration. It helps teams translate diversity into collaboration – unlocking their potential to translate insight into action and act as effective agents of change.
As Swisscontact’s long-term Global Guardian for Inclusive Systems Development, Ailsa has shaped frameworks, toolkits, capacity building offers and learning platforms that embed systems thinking into development practice. She brings a strong systems lens to team coaching, helping teams understand how their behaviours, incentives, and relationships interact with wider systems.
Ailsa coordinates the Springfield Centre’s team coaching offer. She ensures coherence, quality, and learning across the team coaching portfolio working closely with coaches and clients to co-create journeys that strengthen leadership, improve performance, and enable teams to thrive in complexity.