Rose Cartolari

Why organisations work with Rose Cartolari

• Operator-grade credibility with senior leaders: she co-founded and ran the operations of Scharper Pharmaceuticals through to a 2011 sale, then turned that experience into a coaching practice. She has sat in the chair the room is talking about.
• A board-level lens on inclusion as leadership capability, built through her Executive Committee role at European Women on Boards and the Board Readiness Programme she launched there.
• Cross-cultural fluency that holds up in genuinely complex settings, drawn from senior roles at American Express and UNICEF and on-the-ground postings in India, Indonesia and Somalia.
• A coaching toolkit grounded in neuroleadership, emotional intelligence and social styles, applied to specific senior problems: influence across the C-suite, executive presence, succession readiness.
• Teaches the material as well as practises it, through executive programmes at Columbia Business School, SDA Bocconi and the University of Milan-Bicocca.

Biography highlights

• Founder and Managing Director, RC Consulting, advising C-suite leaders and their teams on leadership, influence and inclusion.
• Executive Committee member, European Women on Boards; launched the EWOB Board Readiness Programme.
• Co-founder and former COO, Scharper Pharmaceuticals SpA, exited in 2011.
• Senior corporate roles at American Express and UNICEF, with field postings across India, Indonesia and Somalia.
• Executive education faculty at Columbia Business School, SDA Bocconi and the University of Milan-Bicocca.
• MBA, Columbia Business School. BA, Brown University. Forbes Coaches Council member. TEDx speaker (TEDxArona).
• Co-author, Winning Mindset: Elite Strategies for Peak Performance (Erik Seversen, ed., 2021).

Biography

Senior leadership rarely fails on technical knowledge. It fails on composure, influence and the ability to hold a team together when conditions stop being stable. That is the territory Rose Cartolari works in, and she works in it from the position of someone who has held an operating role at scale and then chosen to coach the people who hold those roles now.

Cartolari is Founder and Managing Director of RC Consulting, a leadership advisory and executive coaching practice for the C-suite and their teams. Before founding RC, she co-founded and served as COO of Scharper Pharmaceuticals SpA, a European pharmaceuticals business sold in 2011, after senior roles at American Express and UNICEF, including field assignments in India, Indonesia and Somalia. That operator history is the reason her conversations with senior leaders sound like conversations between peers, not between a leader and an outside expert.

Her work sits at the point where leadership behaviour meets inclusion practice. On the European Women on Boards Executive Committee she launched the Board Readiness Programme, which prepares senior women for credible non-executive roles. She holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from Brown, sits on the Forbes Coaches Council, and teaches executive programmes at Columbia Business School, SDA Bocconi and the University of Milan-Bicocca.

She is co-author of Winning Mindset: Elite Strategies for Peak Performance and a TEDx speaker (TEDxArona). The throughline of the work is practical: senior leaders, under pressure, learning to influence other senior people, hold their own counsel under ambiguity and turn inclusion from a value statement into a leadership behaviour.

Key speaking topics

• Executive presence and influence across the C-suite
• Inclusive leadership as a senior capability
• Leading senior teams through change and ambiguity
• Board readiness and the path to non-executive roles
• Personal leadership and self-awareness for senior roles
• Cross-cultural leadership in multinational organisations
• Emotional intelligence applied to executive performance

Ideal for

• C-suite executives and their direct reports working through ambiguity, restructure or succession
• Senior women preparing for non-executive director or board positions
• Heads of executive development, talent and inclusion building senior leadership pipelines
• Multinational leadership teams operating across multiple cultures and geographies

Audience outcomes

• A sharper read on how senior influence works and where their own influence is leaking
• Language and practices for inclusive leadership that hold up in front of other senior leaders
• A specific view of board readiness, what selectors actually look for and how to close the gap
• Tools from neuroleadership, emotional intelligence and social styles applied to live senior dilemmas
• A working definition of executive presence that is behavioural, not stylistic