- Location: Washington, DC, USA
- Local Time:–:–:–
Vernice Jones
I am a relational and holistic coach who helps leaders access more of their gifts and leadership capacity.
Vernice believes that leaders can learn to expand their impact and agility through presence, connection, and awareness across contexts. With over 15 years of experience working with global Fortune 500 companies and large nonprofits, Vernice Jones creates experiential leadership programs and leadership development solutions that connect and drive business results.
Vernice is a Director and Faculty of Adult Development at Georgetown University’s Institute for Transformational Leadership. She is also an Associate (Coach, Facilitator, Consultant) at Cultivating Leadership, where she is currently co-faculty of The Leading Inclusively Lab. Vernice leverages her former experience as a diversity, equity and inclusion leader in her work in the Leading Inclusively Lab and her work leading circles of executive women of color. Vernice designed and delivered a two-week curriculum and trained instructors for prospective students at Duke University’s prestigious Leadership Academy in North Carolina, Shanghai and Beijing, China. Through her executive coaching business, she has been an executive and professional coach for clients in the US, Europe, Africa and Asia.
As a certified coach, Vernice Jones has completed coaching certification programs from the Coaches Training Institute (CTI), and Organizational and Relationship Systems Coaching through CRR Global. She is qualified to administer The Leadership Circle 360 profile, and the Myers Briggs, MBTI. Vernice has been designated by the International Coaching Federation as an MCC (Master Certified Coach), and a mentor coach.
Vernice graduated from the University of Maryland with an undergraduate degree in Economics. She also holds a Masters degree in Finance and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business. Vernice has worked on a number of community development projects including an Origami camp for girls in South Carolina, an English language program for Chinese seniors, and a program for church elders at a church with locations in South Africa, Zambia and Nigeria.
I have been an executive and professional coach for clients primarily in the US, Europe, Africa and Asia. I have extensive experience coaching senior and C-Suite global leaders of color and/or from the LGBTQIA community.
I created Sister Leader Circles in the early days of the global pandemic as I witnessed clients struggle to deal with their own grief and anxiety while taking care of the many others in their lives. The Circles – by design – host a diverse mix of client leaders, of national origin, of color, of faith, of ethnicity, of gender expression. The formation of the Circles was an effort to deepen the impact and possibility of executive coaching through community, coursework and collective intelligence.
I recently hosted a two-day retreat of these global leaders at my home in the Washington Metropolitan area in the US. The retreat focused on personal awareness, networking and leveraging the potential of this extraordinary group of leaders. What circle members continue to tell me is that their time together transforms not only their leadership, but their lives.
I am a holistic and relational coach who uses a developmental approach to work with global, for profit senior leaders and nonprofit social justice leaders. In the day-to-day challenges, I partner with the client to examine their typical patterns, navigate the dynamics of work/client/customer relationships and step into more of their capacity as a leader.
My work is shaped by an alchemy of theory and life experience as well as inner, interpersonal and systems awareness. This includes influences of adult development theory, trauma-informed somatic experiencing, phenomenology, and principals of justice, equity and inclusion and belonging. My coaching approach is based on the premise that deepening self-awareness, understanding the complexity of context and even where a leader may be contextualized by their context are foundations to a leader’s development.
Isela Gracian“Vernice’s gift as a coach is her ability to peel back the layers for leaders to center in their most natural state of leadership. She then brings in concepts, conversations, practices, and tools to help with the code switching needed to be successful in the diverse spaces and places leaders have to work in. I appreciated that she did not pre-define what success is. She guided the conversations for me to define that for myself. I started off my time with her thinking I had no more space to grow and ended with a feeling of infinite possibilities on my leadership journey.”
LA County Board of Supervisors
I provide coaching, facilitation and training. I am core faculty for the Growth Edge Coaching series of programs and serve on Cultivating Leadership’s TILT Foundation Board. I also co-founded the Leading Inclusively Lab, Wisdom in Leadership series and Sister Leader Circles.
Answer goes here…
I began an exploration of meditative practices in high school when my father insisted that the entire family attend meditation instruction. It was a radical move at the time. I recall it feeling like an exhilarating, adventurous experiment, and quickly integrated a regular although perfunctory meditation practice into my daily schedule.
That practice turned out to be life altering in a way I couldn’t have predicted. Meditation led to sensemaking and spiritual awareness, giving me an invitation to stand on the balcony of my experience. That simple introduction has fundamentally shaped the quality of experiences that give me so much joy today, from hiking the mountains at the foot of fjords in Norway, or the first time having a conversation in Mandarin in China or sitting on my deck watching hummingbirds with a cup of tea and a book of poems.
Although many of my clients have complex intersectionalities and origin stories, I am not a psychologist.
