About Karise

I’m a Professor of Leadership with over 20 years of experience consulting, researching, teaching, writing, and speaking about leadership.

Alongside my academic teaching and research, I work with private sector businesses, governments and public sector organisations across the world.

My passion is to help leaders grow in strong and healthy leadership, leading themselves and those around them with wisdom and integrity.

At Illuminaire, we believe storytelling makes complex research both memorable and impactful, fostering leaders’ personal and professional growth while building resilience and unity within their teams.

Read Karise’s latest book:

Leadership and Small Business:
The Power of Stories

Beyond information

The work of Illuminaire is expressed through the transcendental lens of:

  • Knowledge/information: Illuminaire’s curation of high-quality research led insight provides a rigour to the leadership conversation at the coffee, dinner, team working, and board room tables. 

  • Wisdom/ethics: in a fast-evolving world marked by great uncertainty and complexity, Illuminaire provides leaders with the opportunity to build an ethical framework informed by the wisdom of others that will guide complex decision-making.

  • Creativity/innovation: since the goal is not information but leader transformation, the Illuminaire learning experience is about a return to first principles and right-brained thinking drawing upon a range of multi-disciplinary tools and embodied learning, including art. 

In this fast-changing technological landscape, leaders have access to more information than ever before. But, when it comes to learning, leaders don’t need more information - the future instead belongs to leaders who can connect the dots. Rather than simply disseminating information, Illuminaire helps leaders learn how to make sense of the data and cultivate a principled framework through which to make decisions that sustain effective leadership over time. 

Meet the team

  • Head of Content & Creative and Managing Editor, Illuminaire Press

    A spinner of many plates, Christine's career has spanned marketing, PR, sales, editorial, writing and business development roles across multiple sectors. Trained in one of publishing's Big Four, Christine spent several years in London working in independent magazines and digital publishing. She has written on subjects as diverse as faith, culture, relationships and food (which led to a stint as editorial assistant on Delia Smith's last cookbook!). Her work has been published online by leading Christian think tank Theos and in the Guardian and Huffington Post, amongst others. 

    She combines her love for writing and beautiful publications with an entrepreneurial drive honed within marketing, PR and sales roles, including leading marketing and PR as co-founder and director of an award-winning drinks startup. Before joining Illuminaire, Christine was working in business development, mentoring entrepreneurs while building her own freelance portfolio in branding and marketing. She brings this business acumen and strategic perspective to Illuminaire, leading on partnerships, collaborations and our overall brand strategy and growth. She is also an experienced and intuitive facilitator and mentor, and will be providing coaching and mentoring to leaders as part of Illuminaire’s growing offerings to leaders in 2025.

    A native of Australia, Christine now lives on the North Coast of Northern Ireland with her two young children.


  • Executive Coach

    Allison brings over 30 years of business leadership experience to executive coaching. For over a decade now, he has a track record of empowering personal success through better habit installations and developing a growth mindset. He delivers one to one coaching and professional skills development training with executives focusing on key sectors such as FinTech, Creative Industries, and Higher Education.

    Allison has a Practitioner Diploma in Executive Coaching from the Association of Executive Coaching and is a qualified counsellor by the British Association of Counselling Psychotherapy. He is also a qualified Test User for Korn Ferry Talent Q by the British Psychological Society.

  • Creative Assistant and Associate Editor, Illuminaire Press

    With a background in textile design and experience working in small businesses and non-profits, helping them to craft their stories, Cleo brings a creative edge to Illuminaire. She assists us in telling a better story of leadership through our communications channels, honouring our value for beauty and art. Passionate about the wider community impact that good examples of leadership can yield, Cleo is excited by Illuminaire’s vision to light up the long shadow of leadership and see transformation in this space.

    Originally from the North of England, Cleo has spent the last few years living on the North Coast of Northern Ireland and joined the Illuminaire team in September 2024. 

Let’s work together

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