There’s a moment I’ve watched happen hundreds of times.
A leader walks out of a coaching session lit up. Clear. Ready. They’ve named the thing they’ve been avoiding, they know how they want to handle it, and for about seventy-two hours they carry themselves differently.
Then Tuesday arrives.
A hard conversation lands on them at 4:45pm, right as they’re packing up. A team member goes quiet in a meeting and they can’t read why. An email from the board knocks the wind out of them. And everything we worked through three weeks ago is sitting in a notebook in a drawer, not in the room with them.
That’s the gap. Leadership doesn’t happen in the session. It happens in the moment. And in the moment, most leaders are entirely on their own.
The second thing I couldn’t stop noticing
The leaders who most need support are almost always the ones least likely to get it.
Frontline managers, promoted on a Friday and leading their former peers on the Monday. Team leaders in not-for-profits carrying enormous emotional load on a shoestring. Principals and deputy principals. First-time leaders in small businesses where “professional development” means whatever’s free on YouTube.
These are people carrying real responsibility for other human beings — and there’s no budget line attached to them.
Meanwhile, executive coaching runs $10,000 to $15,000 a year. I know, because I’ve charged it. It’s worth it, and I stand behind every dollar of it. But let’s be honest about what that means: the support that genuinely changes how someone leads has been reserved for the top two floors of the building.
That’s not a market gap. That’s a wall.
And the cost of that wall isn’t abstract. It shows up as the manager who avoids the performance conversation for eight months until it becomes a termination. The team leader who burns out because nobody ever taught her that boundaries are a leadership skill, not a personality flaw. The good person who quietly becomes a bad boss because no one was there at 4:45pm on a Tuesday.
I’ve been in the room for the aftermath of all three. Many times.
→ Back the campaign: https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/soniamcdonald/worksparks
→ Start your 14-day free trial: https://worksparks.com/
So I built Worksparks
Worksparks is AI-powered leadership coaching, available in the moment you actually need it.
Not a course you have to finish. Not a video library you’ll open once with good intentions. Not another platform your organisation buys and nobody logs into. A coach you can open at 6:50am in the car park before the meeting, or at 9pm when you’re lying awake replaying the conversation that went sideways.
Here’s what makes it different from asking a generic AI chatbot for leadership advice — and I say this as someone who tested a lot of them before deciding to build my own.
Every framework I’ve developed over eighteen years is built into it. The Leadership Brain Framework™. The Courageous Conversation DOD™. The Leadership Pause Model™. The Human Leadership™ Framework. The Leadership Compass™.
So when you’re preparing for the conversation you’ve been avoiding, it doesn’t hand you a generic list of tips. It takes you through DOD properly — stripping out the adjectives, the motive, the story you’ve built on top of what actually happened, until you’re left with what a camera would have recorded. Which is the only place a courageous conversation can safely start.
That’s not a chatbot with a friendly tone. That’s a methodology, and it’s one I’ve watched work in boardrooms, on mine sites, in schools and in hospitals.
Worksparks is A$29 a month, with a 14-day free trial.
Two coffees a week. That’s the number I kept coming back to during the build, because if it wasn’t going to reach the people on the frontline, there was no point building it at all.
It’s live right now. You can try it today.
And now the part I find difficult
We’re running an Indiegogo campaign to fund the next stage of the build.
Specifically: full team functionality, so a leader can bring their people with them rather than improving alone while their team stays where it was. Deeper integrations into the tools people already work in. And the rest of the frameworks, built out to the standard the first ones were.
I want to be honest about how this feels, because I write about courage constantly and it would be a bit rich to skip past it.
I have never crowdfunded anything in my life.
I started LeadershipHQ in 2008 as a sole parent, after roughly forty job rejections. Forty. I have funded every single thing since then out of my own pocket — the books, the programs, the platform, the lot. Self-reliance isn’t a strategy I chose so much as a reflex I built out of necessity, and eighteen years later it’s still my default setting.
Asking for help sits badly with me. It always has.
But here’s what I’ve had to sit with: the thing I tell other leaders constantly is that carrying it all alone isn’t strength, it’s just the version of strength you learned when you had no other option. And at some point you have to be willing to take your own advice in public.
This is bigger than what I can fund alone, and it’s better with people behind it.
The tier I’d point you to…
Team Spark — A$1,950 for ten seats, held permanently.
Early Spark – A$19, worth $87
Founding Member – A$99, worth $2900
Not ten seats for a year. Ten seats, kept.
If you lead a team, this is the one. And if you know a not-for-profit, a school, or a community organisation carrying far more than its budget allows — this is the tier I’d love to see land with them.
→ Back the campaign: https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/soniamcdonald/worksparks
→ Start your 14-day free trial: https://worksparks.com/
The campaign closes 10th October
If backing isn’t right for you at the moment, I completely understand — and sharing this with one leader who’s currently doing it alone helps more than you’d think.
One last thing
I’ve spent my whole career arguing that leadership is a human skill, not a title. That courage and kindness aren’t soft. That the best leaders are the ones who’ve been supported well enough to support others.
Worksparks is the most direct thing I’ve ever built to back that up. Not a keynote about it. Not a book about it. The actual support, in the actual moment, at a price that doesn’t lock out the people who need it most.
Thank you for reading — and for being here.
With courage and kindness,
Sonia McDonald
Founder & CEO, LeadershipHQ | Creator of Worksparks
What’s the moment you most wish you’d had someone to call? I read every comment.
#Leadership #HumanLeadership #Courage #LeadershipDevelopment #Worksparks #Coaching
