I need your help. In 2008, I was a sole parent with a mortgage, a small daughter, and a folder of rejection emails I’d stopped counting at around forty. I got told no forty times. So I built it myself.
Forty times somebody read what I could do and decided it wasn’t what they needed. I remember the particular quiet of the afternoons — Abby asleep, laptop open, refreshing an inbox that wasn’t going to help me.
So I stopped waiting for permission and started LeadershipHQ.
Eighteen years later, I’ve coached leaders across construction sites, hospitals, government departments and boardrooms. I’ve written three books. I’ve stood on stages in front of thousands of people and talked about courage.
And in all that time, one thing has bothered me more than anything else.
The people who need coaching most almost never get it
Here’s how leadership development actually works in most organisations.
There’s a budget. It’s not large. It goes to the people who are already senior, already identified, already doing fine. They get the two-day program, the 360 review, the executive coach they can book on a Thursday.
Meanwhile there’s a woman who got promoted six weeks ago and now manages the people she used to have coffee with. There’s a team lead who’s been avoiding a performance conversation for a month because nobody ever showed her how to have one. There’s a founder at 11pm with no one above them to ask.
Nobody is coaching those people. They’re the ones making leadership decisions every single day, and they’re figuring it out alone.
I’ve watched it for eighteen years. Good people, out of their depth, doing their best in the dark — and then being judged on the results.
That’s not a talent problem. That’s an access problem.
What I kept running into
The coaching I deliver works. I’ve seen it change how people lead, and occasionally change their lives.
But it’s expensive. It’s slow. It happens in a room, on a date in someone’s calendar, weeks after the moment that actually mattered.
Because here’s the thing about leadership: it doesn’t happen in the workshop. It happens at 2pm on a Tuesday when someone’s crying in your office and you have no idea what to say. It happens in the ninety seconds before you walk into a meeting where you have to disagree with your boss.
Nobody has a coach in that moment. Everybody needs one.
If you would LOVE to invest please go to https://worksparks.com/investors/
So I built Worksparks — and it already works
I want to be clear about this, because most things you’re asked to back on Indiegogo don’t exist yet.
Worksparks is built. It’s live. People are using it right now — asking it about the conversation they’ve been avoiding, the feedback that landed badly, the decision they keep circling at 11pm.
It’s an AI coach for work. Not a chatbot with a leadership skin — it’s built on the neuroscience and behavioural research I’ve spent my career teaching. How trust actually forms. What happens in your brain under pressure. Why psychological safety changes performance in ways that motivational posters never will.
You open it when you need it. You describe what’s happening in plain language — no jargon, no framework to learn first. And you get coaching that’s practical and specific to your situation, in the moment you’re in.
Before the conversation you’re dreading. After the day that went badly. When you’re not sure whether to speak up.
It’s everything I know, available at 11pm on a Tuesday to someone who will never be in my workshop.
Two things I want to be straight about
This is for anyone at work, not just people with a team. Some of the hardest situations at work are faced by people with no authority at all — managing upward, workload nobody’s saying no to, feedback that landed badly. I built this for them too.
What you write in it is yours. This only works if you can be honest, and you can only be honest if you know where it goes. Your conversations aren’t visible to your employer, to other users, or to a manager. On team accounts the admin sees who holds a seat and how much the group uses it — never what anyone wrote. Not the text, not a summary, not an excerpt. I’d rather tell you exactly where that line sits than make a vague promise about privacy.
What I’m asking for…
So if it’s already built, why am I on Indiegogo?
Because what exists today is a first version. It’s good. It isn’t yet what the people using it deserve.
$25,000 is what takes it from working to extraordinary — deeper coaching, courageous conversations built in, the features that turn a good beginning into a genuine companion for anyone at work.
Indiegogo runs fixed funding, which means if we don’t reach it, nobody is charged a cent. Every backer is refunded. So there’s no risk in being early. There’s only the difference between good and great.
Backing it also gets you in at a price that will never come again — a year of access for the cost of two coffees, or lifetime access for less than most people spend on lunch in a fortnight.
I’ve spent my whole career telling people that leadership is an attitude, not a title.
This is me putting my money where my mouth is.
Please support my campaign…
https://www.indiegogo.com/en/projects/soniamcdonald/worksparks
And if it isn’t for you — send it to the person you thought of while reading this. That helps just as much.
Let’s build a world of braver, more human leaders. Together.
Sonia x
If you would LOVE to invest please go to https://worksparks.com/investors/
