Vanessa Chehlawi leads Egon Zehnder’s Leadership Advisory Practice in the Middle East. She advises clients on solving leadership challenges and developing themselves, their teams, and their organization. She helps support them on their journey through CEO Succession Planning, Executive and Board Assessment, Leadership Development, Executive Coaching and Top Team diagnostic and journeys. Vanessa previously co-led the Leadership Advisory Practice in Canada when she was based in the Toronto office.
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 a 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 enjoys dancing, yoga, traveling, writing, and learning languages.
