Sara Hicks is an executive coach, author, and guide for people navigating hard transitions, in their organizations and in their lives.
She is the co-author of The Intentional Organization: A Leadership and Management Guide, and a founding partner of The Intentional Organization, a coaching practice built on a simple belief: the hardest conversations are usually the most important ones, and most of us were never taught how to have them. Her work with leaders and teams centers on clarity, honesty, and the courage to say the true thing instead of the comfortable one.
That belief did not begin in a boardroom. It began at her mother’s bedside, then her father’s, six months apart, and a few years later, at her brother’s. All three to cancer.
Sitting with people at the edge of their lives, and with the people who loved them, taught Sara things no leadership framework ever could. She learned that dying well and living well ask the same thing of us: presence, honesty, and the willingness to stay in the room when it would be so much easier to look away. She learned, too, that grief does not belong only to the person who is dying. It moves through everyone who loves them, and the family and friends left standing at the edges often need almost as much support finding the words as the person at the center does.
That experience now shapes a second, quieter thread of Sara’s work: sitting alongside people and families facing terminal illness and major life transitions, helping them find language for what feels unspeakable, and helping the people who love them stay present instead of retreating into silence or well-meaning platitudes. It is, in many ways, the same work as her coaching, just closer to the bone.
A longtime yoga practitioner with a deep interest in the philosophy of embodiment, what it means to actually inhabit a body moving through change, Sara treats presence as a practice, not a personality trait. It is the thread that runs through all of her work, whether she is helping a leadership team have the conversation they have been avoiding for a year, or sitting quietly with someone who has run out of time for avoidance altogether.
She brings to this work a decades-long career building companies and leading teams, including as co-founder and CEO of Reaction Commerce, later acquired by Mailchimp, where she went on to serve as Chief Product Officer. That background taught her how to build trust at scale. This later chapter taught her what trust is actually for.
Sara lives in Los Angeles.