A Master Certified Coach ranked in the top 1% of coaches globally, who swapped a senior leadership career in education to build a seven figure business around her kids, and who has herself been the stressed, overstretched leader on the brink of burnout, has launched a new book to change the way we lead.
Ruth Kudzi, 48, Coaching Psychologist, mum of two from London and founder of coach training school Optimus Coach Academy, is celebrating her new book ‘Coaching Leaders: SERVE Your Way to Team Success’ after it jumped straight to the top of the Amazon charts overtaking “Think Again” by Adam Grant and Lean In by Sheryl Sandburg to become a number one bestseller.
Within the book Ruth launched a brand new 5 step leadership framework, SERVE™ to help exhausted managers stop being the bottleneck, cut their stress and finally get the best out of their teams, something she has defined after having developed thousands of leaders over two decades of coaching, from overwhelmed first time managers to executives in fast growing businesses.
This comes as it becomes widely recognised that the UK has critical skills gaps in this area as research from Harvard Business School shows that over 82% of managers received no leadership training when they stepped into the role, creating a generation of ‘accidental managers’ who were promoted for technical excellence and left to sink or swim. Meanwhile the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs research reveals that the most in demand workplace skills are now fundamentally human ones, including leadership, social influence, empathy and active listening, and Gallup research shows that a manager’s own wellbeing directly predicts the wellbeing and engagement of their team.
“Most leaders were never actually taught how to lead,” says Ruth. “They were promoted because they were brilliant at their job, then handed a team and left to figure it out. So they work longer hours, hold every decision, solve every problem, and become the bottleneck. Their stress goes up, their team stops thinking for themselves, and everyone suffers. The answer isn’t to do more. It’s to lead differently, and that’s exactly what SERVE teaches.”
Grounded in psychology and neuroscience, and drawing on the coaching approach already adopted by most Fortune 500 and FTSE 100 companies, including Google and Microsoft, the SERVE™ framework guides leaders through five steps:
- State: how you show up as a leader impacts how effective your connections are
- Engage: build relationships, ask questions and truly engage with your team
- Reflect: reflect on your practice and what is and isn’t working
- Value: value your team, show them you value them, and help them play to their strengths
- Embed: embed the coaching approach until it becomes habitual, building new neural pathways and new ways of leading
Ruth writes not just as an expert but as someone who has lived the challenges of leadership herself. One of only a tiny number of coaches worldwide to hold both the ICF Master Certified Coach accreditation, representing the top 5% of coaches globally, and the Advanced Certification in Team Coaching, representing the top 1%, she has over 10,000 coaching hours, more than 30 years of studying psychology, and has trained thousands of coaches and leaders through Optimus Coach Academy, where she leads a global team of 15.
Yet the former deputy headteacher, who felt suffocated by her career in education before building her own business, has been the exhausted leader she now helps.
“I have been the stressed leader, first in and last out, holding everything for everyone, and I’ve been on the brink of burnout more than once,” she says. “What changed everything for me was understanding my own brain and adopting a coaching approach, and I’ve watched it transform the leaders I work with too. When you stop having to hold all the answers, your team grows, your cognitive load drops, and honestly, you become a nicer person to be around, at work and at home. That’s what I want this book to give people.”
Packed with real coaching conversations, case studies and practical tools, Coaching Leaders tackles the questions keeping today’s managers up at night, including:
- Why do so many capable people become the bottleneck in their team, and how do you stop?
- What does neuroscience tell us about why we snap, micromanage and take over under pressure?
- How can you coach your team when you feel you barely have time to do your own job?
- How do you build psychological safety, trust and real autonomy in a hybrid world?
- What can leaders learn from how Google and Microsoft embedded coaching cultures?
The book launch caps a landmark year for Ruth, whose talk show The Coaching Hub recently climbed into the top 2% of podcasts worldwide, passing 80,000 downloads with listeners in 54 countries.
Coaching Leaders: SERVE Your Way to Team Success is published by Authors & Co and is available from Amazon and Waterstones.
