Anita Hoffmann

Current activities

Anita Hoffmann is Managing Director of Executiva Ltd, a senior executive career transition coaching and search firm, and a Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management.

Anita works on the intersection of Leadership, Sustainability and Longevity and her Purpose and passion is helping executives realise how they can use their experience and positions to help solve societal issues and create meaningful work throughout their potentially 60 year long working lives and careers.

In April 2018 Routledge published her book 'Purpose & Impact: How Executives are Creating Meaningful Second Careers', the companion book for individuals to her 2016 organisational later career paper (Purpose Driven Leader - Purpose Driven Career) for The Doughty Centre.

Anita's has prior senior executive experience in blue-chip industry (Exxon Chemicals, Dow Corning, ABB) as well as in management consulting (Accenture, Deloitte) and as Partner in executive search (Heidrick & Struggles). She is a certified Business Coach (MeylerCampbell), a member of the British Psychological Society and a Fellow of the RSA.

Of particular interest to Cranfield might be Anita's work around leadership competencies in an age when sustainability will be core to corporate strategy (paper for BSR in 2012: Sustainability and Leadership Competencies for Business Leaders) and the leadership competency framework developed from this research; assessing also externally strategic long-term focussed leadership dimensions - normally neglected by traditional leadership frameworks focusing on short term 'efficiency' improvements.

Anita is an advisory board member of Kin&Co, an award-winning consulting firm helping organisations 'Find, Live and Communicate Purpose'. She was a Senior Advisor to the multi-award winning Responsible Investment Emerging Markets Private Equity Firm Actis for 14 years helping them find and assess Advisors, NED's, Chairs and CEO's etc. and since 2019 to Investec's Private Markets Business and particularly the Africa Fund.

She is also a career advisor to Cara (Council for At Risk Academics) Fellows, who Cara has helped come to the UK on PhD or Post doc visas from war torn countries or politically volatile situations where the academics; lives are at stake. Anita is helping Cara create a career and job search resource centre online for the Fellows and providing some pro-bono coaching.