Alison McQuater

Alison is the Programme Director for the Oxford High Performance Leadership Programme and is an Associate Fellow of the Saïd Business School and Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. She is a highly experienced and accomplished programme director who has worked in executive education at Oxford since 2000, designing, directing and teaching on development programmes for senior leaders in a wide variety of organisations. Previously she has worked as a coach and consultant in leadership and organisation change. Current and past clients include a large number of professional service firms, major global corporations and owner-managed businesses. Alison also teaches leadership topics on a number of other programmes at the Said Business School including the Women Transforming Leadership programme. Alison has designed and taught programmes at two other leading European business schools. She is currently leading design work on a new CEO leadership programme at the Saïd Business School. Alison is an experienced executive coach and is qualified in a range of psychometric instruments.

A major focus of Alison’s work has been in the professional services sector over the last ten years, but she has also worked with clients in the software, energy, engineering, pharmaceuticals, health and financial services sectors. The programmes Alison designs and directs typically focus on the challenges of leadership, strategic development of the organisation and client relationship management. In 2012 Alison completed a practitioner focused research project into leadership development within law firms.

For the last five years, Alison has been the Programme Director for the Small Countries Financial Management Programme: this is an annual donor-funded programme which develops capacity and capability in the management and supervision of the financial sector and fiscal disciplines in small, developing nations around the world.

Alison previously held senior management and board-level positions in major global firms such as Accenture, Xerox and Oracle and was a key member of a start-up company management team, building the company to over three hundred employees in five offices over a period of three years.