Vanessa Chehlawi, based in Toronto, co-leads our Leadership Advisory Practice in Canada. She advises clients on solving leadership challenges and developing themselves, their teams, and their organization’s culture. She helps support them on their journey through Leadership Development, Executive Coaching, Executive and Board Assessment, CEO Succession Planning, Top Team Work and Dynamics, and engagements on Diversity Equity & Inclusion and Resilience and Energy Management.
What energizes me most is working with people and striving to understand what deeply motivates them. My goal is to help organizations and individuals thrive through leadership and development advice.
Prior to joining Egon Zehnder, Vanessa was with McKinsey & Company. While serving clients across Canada, the U.S., and Australia, she led digital transformations and led teams to design and deliver agile capability building programs and implement new operating models and ways of working. Before McKinsey, Vanessa held positions in silicon photonics research at the University of Surrey, and solution architecture at Ericsson.
Vanessa graduated from McMaster University with a double major in Engineering Physics and in Management, specializing in nanotechnology, and then earned an Meng in Bioengineering from the University of California, Berkeley. She is also a Certified Executive Coach, from the Transformational Leadership Institute at Georgetown University.
Outside work, Vanessa feels passionate about the refugee crisis, and offers support through work with NGOs in Canada and in Lebanon, her home country. She also enjoys yoga, meditation, dancing, traveling, and learning languages.
