The short version

I've spent over twenty years building and leading high-performing teams and organizations — from an early-stage technology startup to a Fortune 500 telecom company to one of the fastest-growing companies in enterprise technology. Along the way, I earned trust with C-suite decision-makers, built teams from a blank page, and was handed the job, formally or not, of coaching the people around me into their next level. Now I do that work directly, as Tom Brittingham Coaching.

I don't think of myself as a sales coach, or even strictly a leadership coach. The throughline in my own career was always growth — going from doing the work myself to being responsible for other people doing it, again and again, at every level, in more than one industry. That's what I coach now: not a job title, but the act of stepping into more than you've done before, wherever that shows up in your work.

The long version

I got my start the way a lot of leaders do: carrying a number, delivering results, and figuring out fast that performing well and leading well are two different skills that happen to look similar from the outside. Over the next two decades I built that second skill deliberately — as a district manager scaling an organization across seven locations from the ground up, as the CRO of an early-stage startup building a function out of nothing, and later as a director and senior manager inside larger organizations, where "coach" wasn't a job title but it was, in practice, most of the job.

Here's the honest version of why now: after years in the fire — on the front lines of the corporate battlefield, carrying a number every quarter — I noticed the part of the job I actually loved was never the deal itself. It was watching someone I was developing figure something out about themselves and get better because of it. That's enjoyable and rewarding in a way closing another deal stopped being, and it's the kind of motivation that doesn't run out. So I decided to make that the work, instead of the thing I did on the side of something else.

I've sat on both sides of the AI shift that's unsettling a lot of leaders right now — I designed and deployed the AI-powered tools and workflows that changed how an entire organization worked, before most companies were talking about it seriously. And I've sat on both sides of the confidence problem too: elite individual performance doesn't automatically make someone a good manager, and I've coached plenty of talented people through that exact gap, including, at various points, myself.

Outside of work, I'm happiest outdoors — golf especially, partly for the game itself and partly because a golf course turns out to be a remarkably honest place to have a real conversation. I read leadership books obsessively, but almost always the ones about character and integrity rather than tactics; I've come to believe the tactics are teachable, but the character is what actually determines whether the tactics get used well.

Why clients trust me with more than their careers

People have always come to me for advice that goes beyond the job — decisions about their next move, how to handle a hard relationship, what actually matters versus what feels urgent. I don't think that's a coincidence. Trust built on results and follow-through tends to expand past its original purpose, and I think that's exactly what good coaching should do.

Credentials & training

Working Genius Certified Facilitator. Twenty-plus years of applied leadership development inside enterprise and startup organizations, including structured coaching and performance management of individual contributors, frontline managers, and directors.

Start with a Strategic Clarity Session