Dominic Longo

My clients are senior leaders and leadership teams navigating genuine complexity — moments where experience and good intentions aren’t quite enough anymore, and something in how they’re leading needs to expand. I work across sectors: from Fortune 100 companies to mission-driven nonprofits, founder-led startups to government agencies and universities. Engagements range from one-to-one executive coaching to team and group development to the design of multi-month cohort programs. Since launching my practice in 2018, I’ve supported hundreds of leaders across more than eight countries.

I worked with the leadership team at Knuddels, a European tech company, at a pivotal moment: they were integrating a new senior leader into the top team and wanted to understand, as a group, how to work well together — their strengths, their blind spots, and how to organize themselves so each person could do their best work. Each leader completed a Leadership Circle Profile, and then we came together to make sense of the results as a whole team. The most valuable outcome wasn’t the individual insight — it was working with the system itself. That built trust, deepened how the leaders understood one another, and changed how they coordinated across the team.

I work at the intersection of the strategic and the human. As a former McKinsey consultant, I’m attuned to what organizations actually need and how to speak in language that budget-holders and C-suite leaders can act on. As a developmental coach and educator, I’m interested in the deeper shifts — in how leaders make meaning, hold complexity, and relate to themselves and others — that produce lasting change rather than temporary behavior modification. I hold both at once: the practical and the transformational, the business outcome and the human being achieving it.

I draw on a range of tools and assessments including the Leadership Circle Profile, the Key Polarity Indicator, and the Intercultural Development Inventory. My coach training is in the Co-Active model (CTI), CoachME (Beckett-McInroy), and Growth Edge Coaching (Cultivating Leadership).

An unusually winding path, in the best sense. I earned a Harvard PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies, and spent years as a scholar and educator — directing a university center for Muslim-Christian dialogue, teaching MBA and undergraduate students about inclusive leadership at the University of St. Thomas, and receiving a Building Bridges Award from a Minnesota community organization for that work. At McKinsey I discovered that the most intractable organizational problems almost always had a leadership problem underneath. Those two chapters — the scholar’s and the consultant’s — shaped a practitioner who is equally at home with ideas and with the concrete demands of organizational life.

I came to specialize in how identity shapes leadership: how who we are influences what we can lead, and what we can’t yet see. My book Queer Flourishing (2025) explores this through the lens of LGBTQ+ experience — but the underlying insight applies to every leader.

Colleague and client lead. I bring CL’s developmental frameworks and global network to large and small organizational engagements, and I partner with CL colleagues on programs requiring multiple facilitators and coaches. I’m particularly drawn to work at the intersection of leadership development and organizational transformation — where the human growth and the business need are unmistakably the same thing.

Coach training and credentials: Co-Active Training Institute (CTI); CoachME (Beckett-McInroy); Growth Edge Coaching (Cultivating Leadership); ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC).

Assessment certifications: Leadership Circle Profile; Key Polarity Indicator; Intercultural Development Inventory.

Academic credentials: PhD in Arabic and Islamic Studies, Harvard University; MA in Comparative Theology, Boston College; BA in French and German, Boston College; advanced Arabic, American University in Cairo.

I live in Manhattan and the Hudson Valley with my partner Martin. I’m a reader and a walker — of cities and of forests, depending on the week. I came to this work through comparative theology, languages, and years of living cross-culturally, and those threads still shape what I notice and what I ask — as does a lifelong love of literature. I’m a Nebraska native, an Italian citizen, and someone who takes the question of how to live a good life more seriously than is probably advisable.

I work with leaders and organizations where the developmental imperative and the performance imperative are inseparable — where becoming a better leader and delivering better results aren’t two different goals but the same one, approached from different angles. That’s the territory I find most alive.

My work goes deep. I’m not a therapist, and I hold that line clearly — but I work with the whole person, not just the professional persona they bring to the workplace. That means identity, meaning, and the assumptions leaders carry about themselves and others are all fair game, because they’re almost always what’s shaping the leadership challenge in front of us.

What I’m less well suited for: engagements where leaders or organizations aren’t genuinely open to being changed by the process. The work requires real appetite for growth, not just interest in better techniques.