Kit Symons & Holly Sedlacek
Senior teams can be technically sharp and still underperform in the moments that matter. Pressure exposes the gap between how leaders think they behave and how they actually show up, and between a team that tolerates each other and one that trusts each other. Most development programmes rehearse models; few build the emotional range a leader needs when the plan breaks.
Kit Symons and Holly Sedlacek help leadership teams build the trust and emotional range that separate functional groups from high-performing ones, drawing on elite football and organisational psychology.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Kit Symons and Holly Sedlacek
- A genuine dual lens on performance under pressure. A former Wales international and Fulham manager works alongside a chartered organisational psychologist, delivered as a two-voice session.
- Sport shows up as evidence. Symons speaks from the dressing room of a Premier League club, and Sedlacek translates what happened there through psychology a board will recognise.
- Content that moves past cliche on the topics leadership teams quietly struggle with: imposter feelings at executive level, handling failure in public, and the emotional cost of transitions.
- Formats built for different rooms: motivational keynote, fireside conversation, masterclass, and follow-up team coaching through Know Your Pace.
Biography highlights
- Kit Symons: 36 caps for Wales; 100+ league appearances each at Portsmouth, Manchester City, and Fulham.
- Kit Symons: Fulham manager from October 2014; assistant to Chris Coleman with the Wales national team from January 2012.
- Holly Sedlacek: MA in Industrial and Organisational Psychology; ICF ACC coach.
- Holly Sedlacek: certified in Hogan, EQi 2.0, DiSC, and Transactional Analysis.
- Holly Sedlacek: 14+ years in Learning and Talent Development across consulting, insurance, and asset management before founding Know Your Pace.
- Co-founders of Know Your Pace, a London-based leadership coaching practice working with leaders in sport and business.
Biography
Elite football teams are not built by talent alone. They are built by how a group handles the week after a bad result, the player who loses form, the dressing room conversation no one wants to have. That is the same territory executive teams live in, and it is where Kit Symons and Holly Sedlacek work.
Symons spent more than two decades inside professional football, with more than 300 league appearances across Portsmouth, Manchester City, and Fulham, and 36 caps for Wales. He went on to manage Fulham and to coach the Wales national team alongside Chris Coleman. He speaks from the dressing room.
Sedlacek brings the discipline that makes the sport insight transferable. She holds an MA in Industrial and Organisational Psychology, an ICF coaching credential, and certifications in Hogan, EQi 2.0, DiSC, and Transactional Analysis. Before founding Know Your Pace, she spent 14 years in talent and leadership development inside consulting, insurance, and asset management.
Together they work with leadership teams on the parts of performance that rarely sit on an org chart: belonging, self-doubt, emotional range, what happens after a mistake. The format is deliberately two-voice, a practitioner and a psychologist in the same room, and that structure is what lets a session move past anecdote into behaviour change.
Key speaking topics
- Resilient leadership in adversity
- High-performing teams
- Culture of belonging
- Emotional capacity in leadership
- Authentic connection and trust
- Self-doubt and imposter syndrome at senior levels
- Learning from mistakes and failure
- The emotional process of career and organisational transitions
Ideal for
- Executive teams and C-suite offsites
- CHROs and people leaders investing in leadership development
- Managers of high-stakes, high-scrutiny teams
- Sport and performance organisations looking at leadership and culture
Audience outcomes
- A sharper read on how individual and team behaviour shifts under pressure, and what to do about it.
- Practical language for the emotional work of leadership: trust, belonging, failure, transition.
- A shared reference point for senior teams to discuss performance without reverting to sport cliches or wellness tropes.
- Tools drawn from recognised psychometric frames (Hogan, EQi 2.0, DiSC) that sit alongside existing leadership programmes.
Talks
How leaders build teams where people contribute fully rather than perform a role.
Key takeaways:
- What belonging actually looks like behaviourally inside a high-performing team
- Where leaders unintentionally signal exclusion
- Practical moves that change the tone of a team quickly
Leading when results, reputation, or plan A have gone.
Key takeaways:
- The difference between resilience and endurance
- How elite sport handles bad weeks, and what translates to business
- Recovery habits that keep decision quality intact
A direct conversation about doubt at senior levels, where it shows up, and how leaders move through it.
Key takeaways:
- Why imposter feelings often intensify with seniority
- Patterns that keep leaders stuck
- Language and practices that reduce the grip without denying the feeling
What separates a competent team from one that repeatedly performs above expectation.
Key takeaways:
- The behaviours that compound inside elite teams
- How trust is built and broken in weekly operating rhythms
- Leader behaviours that set the ceiling for team performance
Leading people, and yourself, through role changes, restructures, and career pivots.
Key takeaways:
- The predictable emotional stages of a transition
- How leaders accelerate or stall the process
- What to say when there is nothing clean to say