Laine Joelson Cohen

Laine Joelson Cohen is an executive and team coach with more than 25 years of experience leading organizational change inside one of the world's most complex global institutions. An ICF-certified coach, she partners with senior leaders and intact leadership teams navigating high-stakes decisions, expanded scope, and enterprise transformation. Her approach is defined by a distinctive balance: she creates the space leaders need to reflect and grow while pushing them to be bold, challenge their own binaries, and make real change. Laine has worked with senior levels across a variety of industries, a sample of which include: Financial Services, Tech, NGO, Medicine, Start-up, Insurance.

Clients work with Laine because she gets to the root of things. She listens deeply, draws unexpected connections, and surfaces the blind spots that keep leaders stuck. Then she holds them accountable to a new path forward. Leaders value her ability to cut through ambiguity, name what others won't, and translate insight into the small, everyday shifts that compound into genuine leadership capability. She is both the supportive thought partner and the challenger in the room, and she is clear-eyed about which one a moment requires.

What sets Laine apart from many in the coaching field is that she has done the job. From 2021 to 2025, she served as Head of Learning for HR at Citi, where she led globally distributed teams through a period of intense regulatory and organizational complexity, including responsibility spanning the firm's 35,000-person Mexican banking subsidiary through its divestiture. She stood up new capabilities, navigated highly technical risk-oriented work, and shaped a culture grounded in curiosity, innovation, and engagement. She also served as one of five HR leaders selected to facilitate Citi's executive leadership offsite with next-level ExCo leaders. Earlier in her Citi tenure, she was instrumental in building and delivering the firm's global Leadership and Executive Development programs. Throughout her career, Laine has been known for leading great teams and then unleashing them on the organization's hardest problems—a track record of operational excellence paired with the strategic instinct to shape highly impactful global initiatives.

That operator's lens shows up in every coaching engagement. Laine coaches leaders who are carrying real weight, and she meets them with the practical, lived understanding of what it takes to lead through pressure, ambiguity, and scale. Her primary focus is executive coaching, team coaching, and the design and facilitation of leadership team offsites, where she helps teams gain clarity on strategy, strengthen trust, and commit to action. She also takes on select leadership development and OD work when the opportunity is right.

Beyond her coaching practice, Laine is an active speaker and contributor to the field, having appeared on The Coaching Habit Podcast and the Work and Life Podcast, and been featured in Inc. Magazine. She holds an M.B.A. in HR Management from Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business and a B.A. in Psychology from the University of Connecticut. She serves on the board of Global Connections for Women (GC4W) and mentors first-generation students through iMentor.