Our Story
Our Story
About Us
Our Story
After 21 years of transforming senior leaders, and high potential leaders into the role model leaders they want to be and others are inspired by, we decided to set up a specialised leader and team player development academy to offer our courses to ambitious people at all career stages who would like to power up their career trajectory.
Headquartered in Auckland - New Zealand, SmartLeader Academy offers leading edge, digital leadership and team development solutions to help leaders, future leaders and team players to become their best version self.
Our Founder
"The first and most vital step in work life and leadership is to know yourself, know your strengths and blind spots, know what happens when you overplay your strengths, the consequences of juggling too many balls at one time, and how to take accountability for creating an empowering work experience. The self mastery course is a great stepping stone to learn all these"
Dr Geoff Lorigan CNZM
Founder of SmartLeader Academy
and Institute for Strategic Leadership
Gareth Lorigan
Gareth has gained considerable experience as an executive leadership coach over the last five years. He works with emerging and also senior executives across a range of organisations from SMEs to large enterprises in the private and public sectors both in New Zealand and Australia. He is a highly regarded executive coach and a team performance coach.
Amanda Woolridge
Amanda is an Executive Leadership Coach of the Institute for Strategic Leadership and has experience in building teams and leaders over 20 years. Amanda has coached Executives, GM’s and Middle Managers throughout New Zealand, Australia and the UK since Amanda uses the SmartLeader Performance Profilers to build awareness, improve communication and increase staff engagement.
Heidi Parlane
Heidi has a passion for helping individuals, teams and organisations to thrive, grow and perform. She works with a wide range of senior leaders and executives in the private and public sector, helping people gain the clarity and insights they need to take action and make positive changes to reach their goals.
Jason Hewett
Jason is a highly experienced coach and facilitator. He has worked with a wide range of organisations at all levels of leadership throughout Australasia, Japan, North America, the UK and Europe. With a strong background in playing and coaching professional sports, he brings a high-performance lens to his coaching style.
Jason is deeply passionate about seeing people thrive, grow and unlock their full potential.
Nick Sheppard
Nick is a highly experienced academic sector leader and has been a high performance sports coach. He has been Deputy CEO of Unitec polytechnic, and the High Performance Coach of the Blues Super Rugby franchise in Auckland, New Zealand.