Raquel Gonzalez-Dalmau

My journey into executive coaching is an unusual one but I believe that the breadth of my experience makes me a much better coach today. I was born and raised in Barcelona and trained as a Civil Engineer in undergrad (including a couple of years in Paris). I worked as a consultant for a couple of years after graduation, but quickly realized that business and leadership problems were much more interesting to me.

I moved to California to do my MBA at Stanford University and the Silicon Valley experience made me a more confident and ambitious leader. Stanford also allowed me to go deeper on one of my passions, earning a Master’s degree in Education. In 2005, I joined Amazon, first in Seattle and then in London. As my corporate career advanced fast, I moved to the European headquarters in Luxembourg, where I launched multiple businesses (Digital Music in Europe, Marketplace in Italy and Spain, WW Localization …) and managed big teams in sales, technical onboarding or software development. After 10 years at Amazon, I decided to change and joined the European Investment Bank, the bank of the European Union. I really enjoyed public service and building a new team – the Digital Communications Division – but after a couple of years, I decided to focus full-time on executive education and coaching.

In 2015, I joined the teaching team of LEAD, the new executive education program of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. What started as a small part-time contract became an important role, as I expanded from the Finance course to Power, Negotiations, Strategy, Communications, Motivating Employees and other courses. Since 2017, I also teach Marketing and Supply Chain to MBA students at Sacred Heart University in Luxembourg. These teaching roles led to my first experiences as a coach, which I loved. As more and more executives asked me to continue coaching them when the course ended, I decided to get fully trained and become a professional executive coach.

My personal experience also influences who I am as a coach: having lived in 5 countries and speaking 4.5 languages, I have an intimate understanding of cultural differences and the global nomads’ challenges. Parenting three neurodivergent kids has taught me enormously about coaching, learning idiosyncrasies (giftedness, dyslexia, ADHD, ASD) and the struggles of working parents. Long-distance running keeps me healthy and provides many metaphors that are relevant in coaching. Finally, I love to read, both fiction and non-fiction, and I tend to recommend too many books both to clients and friends.