Sunny Stout-Rostron
Sunny coaches at senior executive and board level, and has a wide range of experience in leadership development and business strategy. With over 25 years’ international experience as an executive coach, Sunny believes there is a strong link between emotional intelligence and business results – she works with executive leaders and their teams to help them achieve individual, team and organizational goals.
She has developed a succession of leadership and management development programmes within the corporate sector in South Africa, the UK, USA and Australia, as well as a range of international programmes in the corporate, legal and education fields. Her clients include Absa Capital, Cummins Filtration International, Edcon (Edgars), Eskom, Google, Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), Mercantile Bank, Multichoice Africa, Pick n Pay, Santam, Sasol, Standard Bank, TFG (The Foschini Group) and VWSA. Prior to working as an executive coach, Sunny worked for 20 years in television, the newspaper industry, feminine hygiene products (FMCG), IT, and hotels and catering, developing customer research, sales, marketing and leadership development programmes for Southern Television UK, the Portsmouth and Sunderland Newspaper Group UK, Tambrands Ltd UK, Hewlett Packard (Palo Alto, CA), University of Portsmouth UK and Holiday Inns UK. She coaches across public, private, academic and governmental sectors.
Sunny has played a leading role in building the emerging profession of coaching, and her passion is to develop the knowledge base for coaching through research and the critical reflective practice of dedicated practitioners. She has been instrumental in developing master’s programmes for business and executive coach education in South Africa. She is the founder of Sunny Stout-Rostron Associates CC, an Advisory Board Director with the Professional Development Foundation UK (PDF), a Founding Fellow and Research Advisor at the Institute of Coaching at McLean Hospital, (a Harvard Medical School Affiliate), and Founding President of Coaches and Mentors of South Africa (COMENSA). She completed her doctoral research in Executive Coaching with Middlesex University London in 2006, and continues to lecture and supervise coaching research at several graduate schools of business to contribute to the development of executive and business coaches.
Sunny’s philosophy is that coaching is about helping clients to ‘learn from and create wisdom from their own experience’. Looking at ‘mastery of practice’ rather than simply ‘being the expert’ to progress our own and our clients’ personal and professional growth, Sunny encourages coaches and clients to create the space for conversations that get to the heart of issues and concerns that can create change at an individual, team and systemic level. Her coaching looks at deepening the level of conversation to move from performance (what needs to be done differently), to learning (what learning is needed cognitively and emotionally for change to happen in terms of thinking, feeling and behaviour), and being and becoming (who are you, how do you do you, and who do you want to become).