Meet Our Coaches
Kate Tapper
Founder and EMCC Global Senior Coach
Kate has worked with leaders across education, healthcare, engineering, and the creative industries for over eighteen years. In that time, she's coached hundreds of people navigating the real pressures of leadership; the overwhelm, the weight of expectation, and the quiet anxiety that their judgement, nerve, or credibility might not be enough for what's coming. Kate began Bud Development in 2008 to help capable people get out of their own way and lead with natural and grounded confidence. Kate has shaped the practice's approach to coaching, and the coaches who have joined her share the same commitment to depth, warmth, and lasting change.
Who Kate Works With
Kate's clients are typically leaders who want to feel genuinely credible and poised; not just competent on paper but centred and calm. They come to coaching when they're ready to move from surviving their role to leading it with clarity and confidence.
Clients typically want to:
Move past overwhelm and find real traction on the work that matters most
Overcome self-doubt and find the voice and courage to take the next step
Build visibility and influence without it feeling forced or inauthentic
How Kate Works
Kate works emergently without a fixed formula or prescribed process. She brings her whole mind and whole heart to the work, offering insightful challenge alongside genuine warmth. Clients describe the experience as liberating.
"After three failed interviews, I contacted Kate with my confidence at an all-time low. Four weeks and three sessions later, I had the job. Kate has an amazing ability to get to the root of the problem quickly, no matter how confused things feel."
What runs through her coaching practice is a commitment to sustainable leadership. Not pushing harder, but finding smarter, calmer ways forward that can be maintained over time. This means helping clients get clear on their values, build rhythms that create space for reflection, and find a way of leading that works for their whole life, not just their to-do list.
Kate is also the innovator behind Bud Development's group coaching programmes, bringing the depth of one-to-one coaching into a collective setting. These programmes consistently produce breakthroughs that participants describe as profound and lasting.
Background
Before founding Bud Development, Kate directed national and regional leadership programmes and worked extensively in universities. She trained with the Academy for Executive Coaching and holds EMCC Global Senior Coach accreditation, one of the profession's most senior accreditations.
When she's not coaching, you'll find her walking, scribbling in a café, or losing arguments with her children and dogs.
Specialisms: Leadership transitions, strategic thinking, overcoming self-doubt and overwhelm, career transitions, sustainable leadership.
Kemi Oladapo
Partner
Kemi brings twenty years of senior healthcare leadership experience to her coaching practice. She's merged departments, led teams through turbulent change, and navigated the unique pressures of working in organisations where the stakes are genuinely life and death. This isn't theoretical knowledge—it's lived experience of what it takes to lead with compassion in complex, demanding environments.
What makes Kemi exceptional as a coach is her ability to hold space for both the strategic and the human. She understands that effective leadership isn't about choosing between being competent and being kind, it's about integrating both. Her clients value her emotional intelligence, her capacity to ask questions that cut through confusion, and the warmth she brings to even the most challenging conversations.
Kemi has coached leaders across the NHS, Advance HE, and healthcare organisations. She's particularly skilled at supporting people who care deeply about their work to find sustainable ways of leading that don't require them to sacrifice their wellbeing or their values.
Kemi is an ILM Level 7 certified coach. She's also sought after for her energetic and insightful approach to team facilitation.
Specialisms: Healthcare leadership, leading through change, team dynamics, sustainable performance.
Abi Boughton-Thomas
Partner
Abi is both a coach and a therapist, which gives her an unusually deep understanding of how people think, feel, and change. She specialises in solution-focused coaching, an approach that builds on strengths and what's already working rather than dwelling on what's wrong. This doesn't mean avoiding difficult emotions or challenges. It means working with them skillfully to move forward.
What distinguishes Abi's coaching is her calm, grounded presence and her ability to help clients feel genuinely safe while tackling genuinely hard things. She's neurodiversity and trauma-informed, which means she creates coaching spaces that work for people whose brains and nervous systems don't always cooperate with traditional professional development approaches.
Abi never asks clients to "park their emotions at the door", but she also keeps the focus gently on the outcomes you want and how you will act to achieve them. This combination of compassion and clarity is rare, and her clients consistently describe her coaching as transformative.
Abi is an EMCC Global Senior Coaching Practitioner. She thinks, writes, and coaches outside in the Malvern Hills whenever possible, because she believes walking while talking often unlocks insights that sitting still cannot.
Specialisms: Solution-focused coaching, neurodiversity-affirming practice, work-life integration, emotional resilience.
Gary Reed
Partner
Gary created the "Leadership Tree" model from his own experience as an introverted leader who never quite fit the conventional leadership mould. Over the years, he's worked with countless reluctant leaders, people who found themselves in leadership positions not because they sought power or visibility, but because they cared about the work and wanted to make a difference.
If you've ever felt like leadership requires you to become someone you're not, Gary's coaching offers a different path. He helps clients lead effectively without losing their integrity, their authenticity, or their identity. His approach is particularly valuable for introverts, reflective thinkers, and anyone who's been told (explicitly or implicitly) that their natural style isn't "leadership material."
Gary has extensive experience across higher education and healthcare, working with everyone from emerging leaders finding their voice to senior executives navigating complex organisational politics. His coaching is thoughtful, strategic, and deeply respectful of who you are and how you think.
Gary is an EMCC Global Senior Coaching Practitioner. He offers coaching both online and, distinctively, while hiking in the Welsh mountains.
