Hello! I'm Cornelia
If you've landed here, you're probably wondering who's behind Craftport.
I help newly promoted women navigate the first months of leadership without feeling they have to become somebody else in the process.
People spend years becoming brilliant at what they do. Then one day they're promoted and expected to know how to lead, make difficult decisions, manage people, influence senior colleagues and somehow look confident while doing it.
It's quite an ask.
I know, because I've been there.
And over the years, I realised something about leadership.
It's rarely about the thing that's happening on the surface.
A difficult conversation is rarely just a difficult conversation.
A board presentation is rarely just about the slides.
A crisis of confidence is rarely just a confidence problem.
I've learned that asking better questions almost always leads to better decisions.
Was this genuinely about me?
Was it the role, or was I simply still new to it?
Was it the environment I'd walked into?
Or was it simply what leadership feels like when nobody has told you the rules?
This has stayed with me throughout my career, and is at the heart of how I work with clients today.
Why I do this
I spent more than twenty years building a career in the steel industry, eventually becoming CEO of an international business with responsibility for a business turning over more than US$250 million a year.
Along the way I experienced promotion, redundancy, salary negotiations, boardrooms where I was the only woman, impossible deadlines, difficult conversations and more than one occasion where I wondered whether everyone else had been given the leadership handbook that I'd somehow missed.
(As far as I can tell, they hadn't.)
What I learned is that capable people can suddenly feel deeply uncertain when the rules change around them.
Not because they've become less capable.
Because leadership asks different things of them
.
That's why I enjoy working with people at exactly that point of transition.
How I work
If we work together, don't expect me to jump to conclusions.
I'll probably ask questions you weren't expecting because I've learned that the first explanation is rarely the whole story.
Sometimes you'll arrive convinced you're the problem.
Sometimes you'll discover the expectations were never clear.
Sometimes the culture needs just as much attention as you do.
And sometimes you'll realise you knew the answer all along, you just needed someone to help you trust it.
From there, we will decide what will help most.
Sometimes that's coaching, helping you think something through for yourself.
Sometimes it's drawing on my own leadership experience to help you navigate a situation you've never faced before.
And sometimes it's teaching a practical leadership skill that nobody has ever shown you.
The approach changes. The goal doesn't.
It's not about using my preferred method. It's about using the one that's most useful to you.