About Lesley

LESLEY BUCKMAN
LEADERSHIP & EQ COACH

Better leadership starts with what happens within us.

I’m Lesley Buckman, Leadership & EQ Coach, facilitator and speaker, and founder of Inspired Coaching Group.

For more than 25 years, I’ve worked with people and leaders across the UK and Australia.

The thing that continues to fascinate me is what happens beneath our behaviour — the emotions, beliefs, assumptions, communication patterns and different ways of thinking that influence how we respond to each other.

Because leadership gets very human, very quickly.

Understanding ourselves gives us more choice in how we respond.

Understanding other people changes how we communicate, influence and lead them.

This is why emotional intelligence sits at the heart of my work.

Why emotional intelligence?

You can teach someone how to give feedback, delegate, manage conflict or have a difficult conversation.

The harder part is what happens when they actually have to do it.

Someone challenges them. They feel defensive. They second-guess themselves. They avoid saying what needs to be said. They make an assumption about someone else’s behaviour.

They communicate clearly from their perspective, but the other person hears something entirely different.

This is where emotional intelligence becomes practical.

It helps us recognise what is happening within ourselves, regulate what we do with it, understand what may be happening for someone else, and make more deliberate choices about what happens between us.

My work brings that together with leadership, human behaviour, communication and neurodiversity — because none of those things happen independently of each other.

How well we understand ourselves influences how we lead everyone around us.

The person behind the work

I haven’t arrived at this work through one straight career path.

I’ve led and worked with people across recruitment, telecommunications and manufacturing in the UK and Australia, and spent years seeing what leadership looks like away from a textbook — when there are competing priorities, different personalities, pressure, change and real consequences.

I’m an ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and accredited in DISC, Driving Forces and Emotional Intelligence through TTI Success Insights. Those frameworks give us useful ways of understanding behaviour, motivation and emotional intelligence, but I don’t believe people fit neatly into boxes.

My own neurodivergent lens has added another dimension to that work. It has made me deeply interested in the different ways people process information, communicate, regulate, interpret situations and experience the same environment.

So when I work with someone, I’m rarely looking only at the behaviour in front of me.

I’m interested in what’s driving it.

And that’s usually where the useful work begins.