Hi, I’m Maya Harris.
There's a version of this page that leads with the credentials. This isn't that page.
I started my career caring about things. Literally — getting products off production lines and into boxes at Unilever, solving the logistics of how the physical world fits together. I was good at it.
But somewhere in those six years I noticed that the most interesting problems were never really about the systems.
They were about the people running them.
That shift took me into McKinsey, where I spent my first three years as a manufacturing specialist consultant — leading lean transformations on shop floors, building capability in frontline teams across industries. It was there that I discovered what I actually loved: not the operational problem, but what happened to people when they were genuinely developed.
The next seven years followed that thread. As a Learning Portfolio Manager, Master Faculty and Coach at McKinsey, working with some of the most capable professionals in the world, I got a close-up education in the difference between doing a role and genuinely thriving in it.
I left to build Inversion Leadership.
Not because the work wasn't good, but because the work I cared most about — the coaching, the facilitation, the actual human development — had always been additive to the role, not the centre of it. Inversion Leadership is the chance to make it the whole thing.
That professional journey turned out to mirror something personal.
I'm a trans woman. My journey to knowing myself clearly enough to live honestly has made me a different kind of practitioner than I would otherwise have been. It taught me what it costs to perform a version of yourself that doesn't quite fit. It taught me the difference between adapting to survive and genuinely belonging. And it gave me a particular attentiveness to the gap between how capable someone is and how fully they're able to inhabit that capability.
That's what I bring into the room.
Whether I'm coaching a leader who hasn't yet caught up with the role they've been given, or facilitating an organization through something that matters, I'm looking for that gap — and for what's needed to close it.
The most significant shifts I've witnessed — in others and in myself — haven't come from finding better answers. They've come from turning the question around entirely.