Sanne Wendes
Strategic Advisor and Executive Coach. Based in Geneva, Switzerland. Working globally.
A life shaped by experience and by learning to navigate without a map
Over more than 25 years, I have worked across multilateral organisations, foundations, NGOs, and the private sector, holding senior leadership roles with direct responsibility for strategy, governance, partnerships, and delivery. My career has taken me across the globe, including time living and working in Africa, and has been grounded in fields where the stakes are real: HIV, tuberculosis, malaria, immunisation, Covid-19, antimicrobial resistance, and conservation.
Today, my mission has not changed, but how I serve it has. As a strategic advisor and coach, I am in service of the same goals: supporting the organisations, leaders, and teams doing work that matters to do it as well as they possibly can.
I have never had a straight path. I have moved countries, started over, held senior leadership roles in some of the most demanding environments in global health and sustainability, and also lived through the kind of personal experiences that teach you things no professional training can. What all of it has given me is not answers. It has given me a deep understanding of what it takes to find your own way through and a genuine respect for how different that way looks for each person.
I do not offer a formula. I offer presence, deep understanding, and the kind of accompaniment that comes from having genuinely navigated — and still navigating — what it means to live and lead in a changing world.
From inside to alongside
My advisory practice grew directly out of my own leadership experience, and out of recognising that the greatest contribution I could make was no longer in doing the work myself, but in helping others do it better. I know what it feels like to navigate high-stakes decisions under pressure, to hold responsibility for a team while also managing upward and outward, and to be inside a system that is both urgent and complex.
I knew I wanted to be a coach twenty years ago, and began a training. But I put it aside to pursue my career in global health and sustainability. I told myself I would come back to it one day — probably when I retired. Then a moment came. I was at a point where the next step would have been another significant senior role, and I found myself asking a different question: not what I was capable of, but what I actually wanted. I had held senior leadership for long enough to know what that path looked like. And I realised that what I wanted was to change how I could have an impact, not step back from it.
For a long time, I thought of my advisory work and my coaching as two separate strands. It was during my time at IMD that I understood they are one. Both are driven by the same conviction: that the people and organisations doing work that matters deserve the strongest possible support.
The person behind the practice
I am Danish, based in Switzerland, and the parent of two teenagers. Moving between cultures and countries throughout my life and career has made me genuinely curious about people and how differently we each see the world. Parenting has sharpened my attention to what really matters, and to the importance of creating conditions where people can grow.
Nature is a constant in my life and a deep source of sustenance. I live close to it and return to it often. In the cycles of the natural world, in its resilience and its rhythms, I find both perspective and renewal. It reminds me that growth is rarely linear, that periods of stillness are not the absence of progress, and that we are more resilient than we sometimes remember. It is perhaps no coincidence that the work closest to my heart has always involved living systems, whether human or natural.
Away from work, I knit. There is something about creating something tangible with my hands, feeling the texture of yarn, learning a new technique, that offers a different kind of engagement from the work of thinking and advising. It occupies the hands and quiets the mind, and I find it genuinely restorative.
I believe that how we work — the quality of relationship, the honesty of conversation, the presence we bring — is as important as what we are working on. And I believe that sustaining ourselves well is part of doing our work well.
If something here has resonated, I would be glad to hear from you
Whether it is a specific challenge, a question about my work, or simply a sense that this might be the right fit — get in touch. I would love to hear from you.