Vanessa Fanning

Executive Coach
Centre for Public Management

Vanessa is an experienced Executive Coach, having now worked with more than 50 individual clients, with many of these being at SES level. Vanessa herself was a Division Head in the Commonwealth Public service for some 12 years and has also worked at the top management level in a large publicly listed company in the private sector.

Immediately prior to furthering her professional development as an accredited Executive Coach, Vanessa was the Managing Director and CEO of Health Services Australia, a national Government Business Enterprise in the health sector with a multi-site presence in all states and over 750 multidisciplinary professional staff, a position that she held for 7 years. Currently, in addition to having her own executive coaching and strategic consulting practice, Vanessa serves on the Board of a community based non-profit organisation. She has previously been a Director on several Federal Government Boards and over the last 5 years has undertaken consultancies as an external advisor to two public sector audit committees.

Vanessa's career in management has spanned both the private and public sectors, and profit and not-for-profit organisations. In addition to her high level policy, negotiating and commercial experience she has had an overseas diplomatic posting, led numerous international negotiations and has extensive experience in providing advice directly to Ministers and Departmental Secretaries.

Vanessa's objective as a coach is to encourage her coaching clients to develop and build on their own authentic management style. She seeks to provide support in helping managers to identify their own strengths and areas for development, understand the way they influence and relate to peers, supervisors and staff and understand the sources of any conflict in the workplace and how to resolve them.

Building on her own successful track record in leading, managing and implementing wide-ranging policy, administrative and cultural change and in building cohesive performance-oriented teams, Vanessa's particular interest as a coach is to provide support and guidance to executives and senior managers involved in the leadership and management of change in organisations and in driving superior performance focused around the requirements of stakeholders and clients including Ministers. She is interested in the tools and techniques for promoting continuous improvement in organisations through aligning goals, values and performance evaluation.

Vanessa is a Fellow of both the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the Australian Institute of Management and has undertaken several professional development programs in executive coaching, including a level two Certificate with the Institute of Executive Coaching. She has a BA from the University of Melbourne and a BEc from the Australian National University.