Amanda Hahn

About Amanda

My career was built in corporate retail — omnichannel merchandising and planning, building teams, running operations, and the systems underneath all of it. I knew what the business actually needed because I was the one accountable for delivering it. The last seven years of that career, I shifted into enterprise technology transformation as the business lead. Not the project lead — the one who owned the work the system was supposed to serve, and the people doing it. Seven implementations in seven years, including a three-year enterprise-wide Oracle ERP rollout where I stepped into a stalling project, named what nobody wanted to name about executive sponsorship, and kept pushing until the trajectory changed. I didn't set out to be the catalyst. I just couldn't stop paying attention to what I was seeing. What I learned across those years is that the human cost of transformation never shows up on the project dashboard. Burnout doesn't get a line item. Neither does the leader performing certainty they don't feel, or the team going quiet in a way that's more dangerous than the noise. I watched talented people leave at the worst possible moment. I watched leaders get treated as the problem when they were the ones seeing the problem most clearly. That's the work I do now. I coach senior leaders carrying a transformation they didn't design — helping them figure out what's actually theirs to move, and what they've been carrying that isn't. And I coach them to lead it differently: from a coaching mindset rather than a directive one, because a leader who develops capability in the people around them changes an entire system, not just their own output. I also teach this work. I'm senior faculty in an ICF-accredited coach certification program, training executive and organization development coaches, and I teach graduate organization development and change at Pittsburg State University. Teaching changed how I coach. Most coaching helps a leader feel better about what they're inside of — I want them to understand it. A leader who can name what's structural and what's theirs makes better decisions in the moment and keeps making them after the engagement ends. It's also why leader as coach isn't a slogan for me. Developing coaching capacity in people who aren't coaches is what I do for a living. AI is the transformation on every leadership agenda right now, and it's following the same pattern every enterprise system change before it has followed. The technology is the easy part. The adoption, the fear, the identity threat to people who built their expertise in a different era, the team that quietly stops trying — that's where it breaks. I've been working that problem since long before this particular wave. I use these tools daily in my own practice, I'm building AI-informed coach education, and the graduate discipline I teach is the one this falls under. Outside the work, I'm grounded by the simple things. Being outside. Traveling. Paddle boarding. Golf. Taking photos — not to get the perfect shot, but to notice what I usually rush past. Family, friends, and pets keep me rooted. I don't believe in having it all figured out. I believe in paying attention, asking honest questions, and giving yourself permission to build a career and a life that actually fit.