Meet The Team

Our core team of coaches and collaborators share a passion for improving Emotional Intelligence and driving high performance in the modern workplace. Between us, we all share 4 core values that drive and inform all the work that we do: INTEGRITY, CONNECTION, COURAGE and GROWTH. Our commitment is to serve the leaders of the future, with the highest standards of quality, reliability and flexibility, growing ourselves and others in the process.

Our Chiefs

Alina Addison

Chief Founding Officer

Making things happen for you

Alina is the Founder of Adaptaa. She is an EQ and team accredited Executive coach with extensive business skills and leadership experience. She spent 20+ years in the financial services industry, latterly as a Managing Director and Head of Trading and Execution for Rothschild&Co. She is a qualified chartered accountant, having worked with PwC.

Her clients describe her coaching style as challenging, energising, inspiring and unflinchingly honest.

Alina Addison

Chief Founding Officer

STYLES & APPROACH
A positive and engaging executive coach with extensive business skills and leadership experience, Alina’s aim is to help clients focus on important things at work and in life. Her approach is to encourage and support her clients to adapt to change by developing practical solutions and reinforcing the best in them. Her clients describe her coaching style as challenging, energising and unflinchingly honest.

FOCUS
Alina focuses on leaders and aspiring leaders, mainly in financial services, banking and professional services. She is an accredited Emotional Intelligence coach, who also delivers workshops and team facilitation sessions on subjects such as: “Leading with Emotional Intelligence”, “Managing Conflict”, “Working with Strengths” and “Managing Your Personal Brand”. Her coaching clients include Investment Banks, Asset Managers and Private Equity firms. In addition, she does pro bono work within the Charity sector.

BUSINESS & EDUCATION
Alina is an accredited executive coach (ILM7 and EMCC), with 20+ years of front-line business and leadership experience. She qualified as a chartered accountant with PwC and spent 15 years as an investment banker with Rothschild, latterly as Managing Director and Head of Trading. As a Chartered accountant with PwC, she specialized in financial advisory, insolvency and turnaround. She has an ACA qualification and holds two 1st class BA (Hons) degrees in Business Administration and Economics.
Alina is also an active member of key networking organizations, including ICAEW, everywoman and Adelaide Group. Alina was a founding member of Rothschild Diversity Committee and Rothschild Women's Network Speaker Series and is a highly regarded and sought-after speaker at Women events and conferences.

PERSONAL
Alina’s choice to study positive psychology and behavioural therapy has been a deeply personal journey over the last few years, as she worked with, supported and encouraged her autistic son. This journey has inspired and driven her study of and profound insight into personal motivation, focus and positive reframing to achieve sustained behavioural change and success for her son and her clients. In her spare time, Alina is a board advisor and fund raiser for her chosen children charities: Humanitas, Autistica and Hospices for Hope, as well as remotely managing a hotel (www.transylvanianinn.ro/en) she built in Transylvania in 2004.

COACHING QUALIFICATIONS
Alina holds the ILM7 and the EMCC Coach Practitioner and EIA accreditations. She holds the RocheMartin Emotional Intelligence certification and is accredited in the ECR self and 360 EQ psychometric. She is also accredited in using the Team Performance Accelerator model for team coaching and leadership facilitation.

Tatiana Poliakova

Chief Expression Officer

Telling you as it is, even when you can’t hear it

Tatiana is an accredited Executive and team coach, with extensive international leadership experience and great intuition. She worked for 20+ years as an Investment Banker and Management Consultant with BNP, JPMorgan, Booz Allen & Hamilton, Dresdner in NYC, London and Frankfurt and latterly a MD at Nomura. Tatiana has an MBA from Columbia Business School.

Her clients describe her coaching style as transformative, sincere, insightful and challenging while safe at the same time.

Tatiana Poliakova

Chief Expression Officer

STYLES & APPROACH
An executive coach with great intuition to help clients overcome limiting assumptions, adjust their thinking to empower them to achieve professional and personal goals. Tatiana’s style is an intense, honest and sometimes challenging approach. It is based on identifying different aspects of clients’ inherent personal strengths to help them expand their outlook and achieve impossible dreams.

FOCUS
Tatiana focuses on clients with high achieving personality profiles to help them reach their potential, often in intense working environments, while helping them to maintain a sense of work life balance.

BUSINESS EXPERTISE & EDUCATION
Tatiana’s expertise has been developed throughout a 25-year career in leadership positions in Investment Banking and Management Consulting across Europe and the US, where she worked with diverse groups of individuals in highly intense business environments. Having observed, experienced and supported individual development through periods of great change, turmoil and uncertainty, Tatiana was inspired to further understand not only what drives people to succeed but how to combine professional success and drive with personal coherence and wellbeing. Before training as an Executive Coach, Tatiana worked as a Managing Director and Head of Loan Sales at Nomura for the last 10 years, and for the previous 15 years, she was an Investment Banker with BNP Paribas, JP Morgan, and Dresdner in London, New York and Frankfurt. She was also a Strategic Management Consultant with Booz Allen & Hamilton in New York and London. Tatiana holds an MBA from Columbia Business School in NYC and Master in International Economic Relations from the State Finance Academy in Russia.

PERSONAL
With a long term interest in business psychology and personal transformation, Tatiana is an Executive coach with Henley Business School. Her decision to study neuroscience applications in coaching and solution based coaching was based on the challenges she encountered and overcame in her professional and personal life. She also is inspired to support her 14 and 11 years' old daughters on their journeys of personal development, focus and happiness, whilst applying behavioural therapy tools and positive reframing to help them achieve their aspirations. Over the last three years, Tatiana has been a Trustee of the SmileTrain UK board, a charity which provides free cleft surgery and comprehensive care to children in need around the world. Tatiana is passionate about diversity in the workplace, and has been one of the early members of Women in Nomura Network.

COACHING QUALIFICATIONS
Tatiana is completing the Professional Certificate in Coaching at Henley Business School. She is also working towards an EIA accreditation with EMCC. She is a member of Project Kairos Coaching program for Extraordinary Coaches with Rich Litvin. Tatiana has a team coaching accreditation from Insightful Edge to facilitate team coaching using the Team Performance Accelerator model.

Carmen Balacianu

Chief Happiness Officer

Taking you on the path to happiness

Carmen is an ICF accredited Executive coach, with 15+ years of international experience in leadership positions in Pharma, Banking, and High Tech. She worked for Roche, where she was the global Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications. Carmen has an MBA from IESE Business School of Barcelona, Spain.

Her clients describe her coaching style as authentic, caring and grounded, helping them overcome fear and embrace love for the sake of their inner growth.

Carmen Balacianu

Chief Happiness Officer

STYLES & APPROACH
A resilient and emotionally intelligent executive coach, Carmen relies on systemic intuition to help her clients reconnect to what is really important to them, gain clarity to find the answers they are seeking and empower them to grow professionally and personally. Clients describe Carmen’s coaching style as authentic, caring and grounded, helping them overcome fear and embrace love for the sake of their inner growth.

FOCUS
Carmen works with entrepreneurs and leaders and aspiring leaders in pharma, banking and professional services. Her clients have achieved a great deal in life, have lived the “perfect lives” and have “picture perfect” stories to share. Yet, despite all that, deep down, they are unsatisfied, unfulfilled and constantly burned out. Carmen relies on her experience in complex transformational and leadership change, to accompany her clients on their own transformational journeys.

BUSINESS EXPERTISE & EDUCATION
Carmen is an executive and leadership coach, based in Switzerland, with 15+ years of experience in Pharma, Banking and High-Tech industries across Europe, Asia, South America and the US. She started from the bottom and worked her way up, with leading roles in large multinational companies such as Roche, Johnson & Johnson and HSBC. In her last corporate position, Carmen worked for Roche Diagnostic, where she held the position of global Senior Vice President of Marketing, reporting to the CEO of Diagnostics.

Carmen is passionate about Women in Leadership and Diversity and Inclusion. She is the co-founder of Women@RDI (Roche Diagnostics International) and is a member of ADVANCE Women in Swiss Business and Women Rock Switzerland. Carmen holds a BA degree in Global Business and Finance from the University of Portland, in the US, and an MBA from IESE Business School of Barcelona, Spain.

COACHING QUALIFICATIONS
Carmen is a Leadership and Executive Coach certified by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and working towards the Associate Certified Coach (ACC) accreditation. Carmen has completed numerous leadership coaching programmes, including those led by the Leadership Circle, Advance Gender Equality in Business and the Center of Creative Leadership.

Sylvia Rohde-Liebenau

Chief Simplicity Officer

Making complex simple for you

Sylvia is an EMCC accredited Coach and Mediator with more than 20 years of experience. She holds a PhD in International Relations, and has worked as expert and manager in Development Cooperation, as well as for over 17 years HR leader in the European Investment Bank, with responsibility for coaching, mentoring, talent management, organizational health and leadership development.

Her clients describe her coaching style as both supportive and challenging, structured and informal.

Sylvia Rohde-Liebenau

Chief Simplicity Officer

STYLES & APPROACH
An experienced executive coach combining emotional intelligence and analysis, Sylvia helps her clients find clarity and calm in complexity, leverage and expand their strengths, and grow their resilience. Through her grounded energy, presence and focus, Sylvia creates a safe space for clients to connect deep within themselves, bring out their vision and unique qualities and create true impact. Clients describe her approach as both supportive and challenging, structured and informal.

FOCUS
With expertise in leadership development and her own experience as leader in international and financial institutions and consulting, Sylvia focuses on leadership coaching, in particular in international institutions, financial services and multicultural environments. She supports both individual leaders and leadership teams, and regularly facilitates workshops on topics such as leadership presence; effective communication; team and cross functional collaboration; conflict management; and resilience.

BUSINESS EXPERTISE & EDUCATION
Sylvia is an accredited executive coach (EMCC) and accredited mediator (CEDR), with more than 20 years of coaching experience. She holds a Master in Political Science, Law and Literature, and a PhD in International Relations. She started her career in Development Cooperation, first as programme manager within the European Commission, and then as leader for international public sector reform in PLS Consulting / Ramboll Management. In 2003, she joined the European Investment Bank, where she has served in different HR roles, covering areas such as Career and Talent Management, coaching and mentoring, organizational health, and leadership development. Besides her corporate and coaching work, Sylvia is an artist and dancer – experiences that allow her to apply a unique and powerful approach to emotional and body intelligence into her leadership and coaching work.

Koralia Hume

Chief Operational Officer

Creating magic experiences

Koralia's extensive experience in communication and operations derives from working in a professional corporate environment for over 18 years, such us Rothschild & Co, Search Partners, Mersten and CERT. She is the spark that ignites everyone into action.

Koralia Hume

Chief Operational Officer

STYLES & APPROACH
Koralia extensive experience in communication and operations derives from working in a professional corporate environment for over 18 years, such us Rothschild & Co, Search Partners, Mersten and CERT. She also runs a successful family business whilst bringing up her son Vincent. Her approach to life and business is through clear communication and inspired action as well as united approach towards a collective goal. She strongly believes that behind every successful organisation there is a person who implements a transparent strategy, clarity of roles, supporting systems and a well thought-out action plan.

FOCUS
Koralia is the operational power behind Adaptaa. Her main responsibility is to support the company through growth and implement systems and communication channels to ensure its continued success. She has a good track record of identifying gaps and deliver necessary results for an organisation to thrive.

Mary Alder Bentley

Chief Office Manager

Looking after us all

Mary has over 35 year' experience working with senior professionals in both the public and private sector. She has a calm and collective manner and is the glue that holds it all together!

Mary Alder Bentley

Chief Office Manager

STYLES & APPROACH
A professional, calm, hardworking Executive Assistant/Office Manager with over thirty years’ extensive experience in fund management, property, law firms, Chambers of Commerce and at the Houses of Parliament. Mary has worked at all levels and in various environments ensuring the smooth running of people’s work lives as well as, in some cases, their personal lives.

FOCUS
Mary focuses on the efficient day to day running of the administration at Adaptaa ensuring that the business in general runs efficiently and giving support to the team, enabling them to get on with what they do best.

EXECUTIVE COACHING & LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

About Us

EXECUTIVE COACHING & LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

About Us

Meet The Team

Our Chiefs

Alina Addison

Tatiana Poliakova

Carmen Balacianu

Sylvia Rohde-Liebenau

Koralia Hume

Mary Alder Bentley

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