Harris Hawkins

Private practice · Oxford, since 2010

The qualities that carry people to the top are rarely uncomplicated.

A private practice, specialist in training and exacting in standard. It exists for people whose makeup is at once the engine of their success and the source of something harder, which that same success is remarkably good at hiding.

For people who believe that continuous refinement is the truest goal of a successful life.

Current status: all engagements currently full.
Please enquire by email for future openings.
All work is governed by clinician-grade confidentiality.

What we look for

A particular kind of person, present in numbers at the top.

The wiring that produces unusual range, or stamina, or pattern recognition, or an appetite for risk that others cannot stomach, tends to arrive with a second effect. It is felt inwardly, or between people, and it is almost never named, for the plain reason that it does not look like a problem. It looks like character. It looks like temperament, or the ordinary price of the job. Most of all it is concealed by the success it helped to create, which is a curious arrangement when one considers it: nobody thinks to look for difficulty in the person who is visibly doing well, and that person is invariably the last to raise it.

We look. That is the practice, in a line.

Anyone who has spent years in senior rooms has almost certainly met one or two such people, and is unlikely to have known it. What we find is more often unrecognised than untreated: present for decades, worked around, absorbed at a cost that becomes visible only once it stops being paid. It can be named accurately, and once it is, what follows is not treatment in any ordinary sense. It is closer to the removal of a friction that has been there so long it was mistaken for the shape of the person.

Clients tend to describe the recognition before they describe the results. The results do follow, over four to six months of unhurried work, and they show at the office in ways that can be counted, and at home in ways that cannot.

The work

Two kinds of work.

They are related, and they draw on the same eye. The first is narrow and private. The second is a wider brief, and it is the one senior leadership commissions most often.

One

Individual work

Private, one-to-one work with a small number of an organisation's most capable people: the search described above, and what follows once something has been found. It is collaborative, structured over an agreed period, and it is not treatment. Robust and specific methods to identify and expand what is already strong, and to defeat or work around what is not.

It is commissioned externally and directly, which spares everyone the awkwardness of an internal referral, and it leaves any existing medical or therapeutic arrangements exactly where they are.

Two

Insight and commentary at senior level

Our domain expertise falls in two areas: cognition under high pressure, and the medical conditions that affect performance. Boards and principals commission us to give names, words and precision to what is being felt but not articulated. A fractured board. A succession decision nobody can quite explain their reluctance about. A relationship that has become expensive for reasons no one has yet put into language.

Alongside that: alternately routed help for senior people where privacy and optics are paramount, confidential sounding-board sessions with someone fluent in the language of the business, and second opinions for coaches, mentors and psychology colleagues on cases that are not resolving.

Both, in detail  →

Plainly

What this is not.

It is not coaching, and it is not counselling. It is not a wellness service, nor an executive retreat travelling under another name.

We displace nobody. Where a client already has a doctor, a therapist, a coach or a mentor, we work alongside them, and we say so plainly.

The practice is specialist in training, exacting in standard, private in setting, and practical in shape. It is commissioned directly, and it sits apart from HR, learning and development, and employee assistance. Not above them. On a different plane, answering a different question.

Who we work with

Chairs. Founding partners. Board executives. Critical talent. Family-office heads.

What they have in common is not seniority. It is that each arrived carrying something they had long stopped expecting anyone to identify, having concluded, quite reasonably and on years of evidence, that there was nothing there to find.

Our principals and associates are based in London, Doha, Cape Town, Geneva, and Hong Kong. Clients tend to prefer one senior practitioner over several years to a rotation of consultants. So does the work, which rather depends on it.

  • London
  • Doha
  • Cape Town
  • Geneva
  • Hong Kong

In a client's words

To anyone in leadership who seeks to improve, assess, or enhance their team's or company's performance, I would have no hesitation in recommending Dr Harris and team, as I have done myself before.

Julia Charlton LLB · CEO, Charltons Law, Hong Kong & Cayman Islands

Selected commentary

Press.

The principal practitioners

Dr TK Harris & LE Hawkins.

Dr TK Harris

MD · MRCPsych · DPOL (Oxford)

Dr Harris trained in medicine, cardiac surgery, then psychiatry in Oxford. He left traditional medicine to study outlier psychology and leadership dynamics, and founded the practice in Oxford in 2010 in response to work commissioned by alumni of Oxford's Saïd Business School. His work is with what clinical training can find in people whose difficulties and capabilities turn out to share a root. Clients are drawn from a broad range: elite sports, media, high-risk and complexity industries, boardrooms, and principal-level leadership.

He is the author of Exceptional (Amazon, 2023), and contributes a discreet clinical voice to publications such as Inc. Arabia and Entrepreneur, and to selected projects including the MentalWealth AI-guided performance enhancement platform.

LE Hawkins

MSc · RPN · CBE

LE Hawkins brings decades of real-time psychological technique from a career in high-risk mental health settings. Her expertise in dealing with bad-faith actors, escalated demands, and covert dynamics is invaluable in the real world of elite leadership, pressure, and competition.

Engagement

Introductions are received in writing.

Work begins with a confidential introduction, usually through an existing principal, a board chair, or a trusted intermediary. A first private conversation, held at our offices, at the client's location of choice, or by secured line, establishes whether the engagement is right for both sides. Scope, phases, cadence, outcomes and fees are agreed before any formal work begins.

We do not publish a client list. All engagements are strictly confidential, and references are available on introduction. Correspondence is held in confidence, and enquiries that do not progress are not retained.

If any of this has described someone precisely, including the person reading it, then that recognition is the whole of the first step. The letter that follows can be very short.

Offices
London · Doha · Cape Town · Geneva · Hong Kong
Languages
Correspondence accepted in English or Arabic.

The work in detail

Two kinds of work.

The first is individual: private, one-to-one work with a small number of an organisation's most capable people. The second is broader: domain-specific insight and commentary, commissioned directly by senior leadership.

One

Individual work.

A particular subset of the most capable people in an organisation needs a different kind of help, and does not usually know that such help exists.

Their makeup is unusual, and it cuts both ways. The same wiring that produces the range, the stamina, the pattern recognition, the tolerance for risk that others cannot stomach, also produces something harder to live with. It is felt inwardly, or between people, and it has rarely been named, because it has never looked like a problem. It looked like character, or temperament, or the ordinary price of the job. It is concealed, most of all, by the success it helped to create. Nobody thinks to look for difficulty in the person who is visibly doing well, and that person is invariably the last to raise it.

So they carry it. Some plateau. Some leave, frustrated at knowing they have more to give without knowing how to reach it. Almost all assume, quite reasonably and on long evidence, that there is nothing there to find.

We look. The practice was founded in Oxford in 2010 to do exactly that, and the eye it brings is a clinician's rather than a coach's. What turns up is more often unrecognised than untreated: present for decades, worked around, absorbed at a cost that becomes visible only once it stops being paid.

The work that follows is collaborative, and structured over an agreed period: robust, specific methods to identify and expand what is already strong, and to defeat or work around what is not. It is not treatment. It is closer to the removal of a friction that has been there so long it was mistaken for the shape of the person. Clients tend to describe the recognition before they describe the results. The results arrive at around four to six months of unhurried sessions, and they hold up in commercial terms as readily as in personal ones.

A client, at the point he arrived

Jan was sent to us by his chief executive. He had risen quickly to operations director and was, on the account of almost everyone around him, difficult: dogmatic, rigid, forever altering systems that were not his to alter. He was close to being asked to leave.

He had also saved the firm millions. The eye that made him unbearable in meetings was the same eye that found the redundancy in every system he was shown.

Coaching had been tried and had concluded that he would not take responsibility for his own behaviour. His chief executive was unconvinced by that verdict, and sent him to us quietly instead.

What we found took some weeks, and was plain enough once seen. Distinct elements of ADHD and of autism, neither at clinical threshold, sitting alongside a formidable intelligence. Together they produced a man who saw the answer at once and could not see why he should ask permission to act on it. A harsh and conventional schooling, conducted in a second language with his parents on another continent, had taught him to hold control very close. He was not arrogant, and he was not without insight. He was afraid.

His courage had never been lacking. It had simply been misdirected.

He kept the post. Four years later he was running the company, and he remains there. He also married and had children, which he says he could not have done otherwise.

Jan is not his name. Identifying details have been changed to protect confidentiality.

How it is found

A window onto the search.

Exceptionality of this kind is not established by intuition, and it is not established by a questionnaire either. In the room we work from a structured instrument developed across twenty-five years of practice, which sets out fifty-four observable behaviours and asks two people to rate them independently: usually the client, and someone who has watched them work for years. The profile that results is not a measurement and is never treated as one. It is a map of where the conversation should go, and the gap between the two raters is often the most useful thing in it.

What follows is a short extract, unscored, offered only so that the shape of the thing is visible. Twelve behaviours out of fifty-four, grouped as they are grouped in the instrument. Most people recognise a few. A handful of people read a column and find that almost all of it is a description of an ordinary Tuesday, and it is usually the first time anyone has put those particular sentences in one place.

Exploring, improvising

Work where the method has not yet been decided.

  • Thrives where the method has not yet been decided
  • Produces a workable solution quickly, without a worked-out method
  • Redesigns wasteful or tedious processes without being asked
  • Disengages once a task becomes settled and routine

Systemising, precision

Accuracy held to past the point others stop.

  • Notices errors and inconsistencies that others have read past
  • Sustains specialist knowledge well beyond what the role requires
  • Reaches the same conclusion regardless of who is arguing against it
  • States an unwelcome fact even when it will cost them personally

Visualising, mobilising

Seeing in shapes, and carrying others along.

  • Works a problem as a shape, model or image before words
  • Arrives at workable solutions by routes others do not consider
  • Attracts loyalty well beyond the task or the situation
  • Sustains effort in matters of principle, well into personal cost

Two cautions, which we would state in the room and so state here. Recognising yourself in a column establishes nothing on its own, since these are behaviours and not conditions, and they are distributed across the whole population rather than confined to any group. And the instrument earns its keep in conversation, not on paper. It is a discussion tool. It diagnoses nothing, selects nobody, and is not used to make decisions about anyone's employment.

Two

When the boardroom becomes a war room.

Boards under sustained pressure stop behaving like boards. The physiology is unglamorous and well described: prolonged cortisol draws thinking out of the neocortex and into older, faster, more absolute machinery, and decisions begin to arrive from the extremes. Defensive paralysis at one end, reckless gambling at the other. Neither serves the business, and either can finish it.

The room's own conventions compound this. Boardroom ritual operates as a kind of blindfold, being precisely the mechanism by which everyone present agrees not to say what they are each privately thinking. The feeling does not leave the room. It is merely truncated, and it returns later, inside the decision.

Our part is to give that material names, words and precision, so that a board can discuss what is actually happening to it. The aim is not to relieve the pressure, which is frequently the point of the enterprise, and on occasion the problem turns out to be a necessary part of the solution. Post-traumatic growth, handled properly, can be trained into something close to anti-fragility, without the instability that ordinarily accompanies it.

An astronomer selects lenses and filters, and knows where to point the instrument. Before astronomers there were astrologers, painting bears and warriors across the same sky, and doing so persuasively. The distinction matters more in a boardroom than almost anywhere, because the stories a board tells itself under pressure are very convincing indeed.

Our domain expertise falls in two areas: cognition under high pressure, and the medical conditions that affect performance. Typical deployments:

  • Communication channel analysis. Giving boards and principals names, words, and precision for the unspoken phenomena at work in high-stakes situations and relationships. Better discussions follow, with better control of risk and a wider set of options.
  • Alternately routed help, at speed, where privacy and optics are paramount. Frictionless one-to-one support for senior people in circumstances where the internal routes, whether HR, employee assistance programmes or the like, would be resisted, or would be indelicate in interpersonal or governance terms.
  • Confidential, offline sounding-board sessions. Senior people field complex and emotionally saturated issues privately, with someone fluent in the language of their business.
  • Second opinions for coaches, mentors, and psychology colleagues. Cases of stress that are not resolving, for instance, where something further down is doing the work: a physical cause, an unusual temperament, or a pattern nobody has yet had reason to look for.

Clarity is more useful than calm. One can see into clarity, whereas one cannot see into calm.

Recent work

Four engagements from the Gulf, 2026.

The crisis of that year disrupted business in the region and well beyond it. These are anonymised but otherwise unaltered. Financial figures are the clients' own estimates.

Safety, and the sense of it

Dubai Airport · Multinational freight forwarder

Planes grounded, staff not arriving, directors and pilots and ground crew in disarray. The firm's Emirati senior advisor approached us on a personal recommendation. Sessions in person for the senior tier; for the wider workforce, our AI-guided cognitive application. The work was to separate actual threat from threat response, and to regulate stress that had turned from acute into chronic.

Result. Operations continued. Some USD 28m of ongoing revenue preserved that would have been lost had they stopped, and a further 8m in recruitment costs never incurred, much of it simply by giving teams somewhere to meet and talk.

Security at senior level

The same firm

Foreign-hired executives carrying profound anxieties about their own future. Duties were being avoided or neglected, and some people were leaving without notifying anyone. We worked on composure, addressing attachment-style anxiety directly, and on the skills that keep a person strategically functional rather than reactive through prolonged uncertainty.

Result. Retention and productivity measurably higher than at comparable firms, with consequences that ran on into continuity of service, reputation, recruitment cost and insurance claims.

Leadership messaging

Analytics division · Qatar investment firm

The chief executive left without notice and the chair called us in blind, to a board meeting. Leadership was communicating priorities poorly and behaving, by its own description, headlessly. We took board-level sessions directly, skilling leaders rapidly in crisis communication and in the pastoral care of their own reports.

Result. Leaders read as more approachable and more empathic, and they acted accordingly: paid flights home for foreign staff, with a guaranteed post on return. It averted what would have been a near-total departmental resignation. Analysts on home leave were at that moment being approached privately by a competitor setting up in Europe.

Positioning and opportunism

Commercial law firm · Sharjah

A practice built on IPOs, and the specialist work had abruptly dried up. Talented lawyers, badly stressed, cognitively narrowed into a defensive posture, and in conflict over how to keep the firm afloat. We worked on self-awareness, tilted positively through a strength-seeking model that grows lateral thinking while keeping hubris in check.

Result. The firm turned outward rather than inward, and reached other firms for ideas and company. One of them referred its surplus of insolvency and financial-restructuring instructions. Revenue returned to pre-crisis levels, and the practice is more diversified now than it was before.

In a crisis this work resembles the pragmatism of emergency medicine rather than the solemnity of the clinic. The boundaries and the rigour remain, encoded but not foreboding. We are as content to give advice on a thirty-second telephone call as alongside a client on a flight, and we work remotely where remote is genuinely better, which it sometimes is.

Quietly delivered, without disruption to the leader's schedule or the board's visibility. We do not make people into what they are not. We help them mobilise what is already there.

Positioning

Where the work sits.

By its nature this work spans several categories, and is easily miscategorised if it is cascaded to the wrong department. It is best positioned as follows.

  • External, strictly confidential, and commissioned directly at senior level.
  • Positive in its optics: the recognition of the best, not the remedy of the fragile.
  • Separate and distinct from learning and development, counselling, and coaching. A parallel plane of work.
  • Held alongside existing medical and therapeutic channels, which remain intact.
←  Return to the practice

Engagement

Introductions are received in writing.

All correspondence is held in confidence. We do not retain enquiries that do not progress.