I ask more questions than I answer.
It’s the center of how I coach, and it took an assignment on the other side of the world to teach me.
The short version
I’m an executive coach for senior leaders and business owners climbing toward VP and C- Suite roles. Since 2019, I’ve coached more than 300 of them and over 65% of them earned a promotion during or immediately following our work together.
Before that, I spent over 22 years leading sales and marketing teams inside global organizations. The story of how I went from corporate leader to coach is worth two minutes of your time.
Chicago, then everywhere
Where the instinct started
I trained as a biochemist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, which explains a lot about how I coach. Scientists want to know what's happening beneath the surface. I've been looking under the hood since before I had a name for it.
My first commercial chapter was at Lambent Technologies, driving revenue across several markets and learning the craft everything since has stood on.
The Masterclass
My years at Croda carried me through five roles, including hair care marketing, pharmaceutical sales leadership to Director of Marketing for Beauty & Cosmetics across Asia Pacific, based in Singapore.
Singapore was my masterclass. I arrived with deep experience and a clear view of what needed to happen. Making it happen across cultures, in a matrix, through influence alone, asked for a different skill entirely. Trust came from proving I held each country's interests alongside the regional goals, and the way I proved it was listening.
That's where the question habit started.
singapore
Charlotte to New Jersey
Transformation runs on people
As Head of Consumer Care for North America at Clariant, I led the full commercial engine, from sales and marketing through R&D, for three consumer markets. My defining challenge: relocating our consumer care center from Charlotte to New Jersey while steep revenue and innovation targets kept climbing.
That meant rebuilding parts of the team nearly from scratch while the business couldn't afford to slow down. It taught me what I now coach leaders through every week: transformation runs on people decisions far more than plans.
Here's the part of the story I tell in every Altitude Check.
I loved almost all of it: the strategy, the teams, the growth. And the hours I loved most were the ones spent helping someone on my team see something they couldn't see on their own.
In 2019, I made them the whole job. Jena Kinney Coaching exists so that the part I loved most is now the only work I do.
Every engagement starts under the hood.
Together we find the beliefs and assumptions quietly driving your leadership, then we test new moves in the real conditions of your actual job. You leave every session with something to try before the next one.
My clients tend to be leaders who want depth. They've read the books and sat through the trainings. What they want now is a thinking partner who has operated at their altitude and knows the terrain.
Most of them walked into their senior roles with real confidence. The climb wears at it. The stakes rise while the feedback gets vaguer, and the moves that always worked start coming up short. Part of our work together is rebuilding that confidence, on ground that holds at this height.
Ready to look under the hood of your own leadership?
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