Pooja Khandelwal

Pooja is a leadership coach dedicated to cultivating resilient leaders and thriving workplace cultures. She has a Masters in Business Administration (MBA), is a Master Certified Coach (MCC), Leadership Circle Profile360 certified coach, Certified Mentor Coach (CMC), and Dare to LeadTM trained facilitator. She was part of ICF’s first cohort of 134 pioneering coaches worldwide to pilot the Advanced Certified Team Coach (ACTC) credential.
As a Global Board member of the International Coaching Federation (ICF) for Coaching in Organizations, she champions coaching as a strategic driver of organizational effectiveness and culture. She also contributed to ICF’s first-ever CoachBoCK (Coaching Body of Competencies and Knowledge), launched in 2025.

At the University of British Columbia (UBC), Pooja is Director, Talent Retention & Career Navigation, leading institution-wide strategies that strengthen career development, engagement, and workforce resilience for over 15,000 employees. Her pioneering Career Navigation approach has measurably advanced engagement by over 10 percentage points—shifting organizational culture toward viewing career growth as a lever for performance and retention. In parallel, she coaches academic leaders, supporting them in building resilient teams and navigating complexity with clarity. Her work blends coaching, systems thinking, cultural insight, and people-centered leadership to align academic and operational priorities.

Pooja’s leadership has earned UBC an Honorable Mention at the ICF Prism Awards for excellence in coaching culture. She was a founding coach for UBC’s Organizational Coaching Certificate Program and previously led ICF Vancouver’s award-winning Leadership Coach-Giving initiative, which won the ICF Global Innovative Initiative Award in 2014 and 2015.