Lesley Thomas

Lesley Thomas is a money behaviour expert, leadership specialist and the founder of The Money Confidence Academy, where she helps leaders understand what happens to judgement, decision making and behaviour when financial pressure enters the business.

With more than 20 years of corporate experience and a Master’s in Executive Coaching and Mentoring, Lesley brings together her experience of business, leadership, psychology and financial behaviour to explore a largely overlooked area of organisational performance: the impact financial pressure has on the way people think, judge situations and make decisions.

Lesley is the creator of the Emotional Balance Sheet™, a framework designed to reveal the human factors sitting behind financial performance. She also developed the Decision Advantage™, which helps leaders understand how pressure, uncertainty and their own relationship with financial information can influence the decisions they make.

Her work focuses particularly on privately owned and PE backed businesses experiencing growth, acquisition, margin or financial pressure. She works with leadership teams to identify the hidden risks that can emerge when pressure changes how people think, communicate and make decisions.

Through executive briefings, leadership workshops and diagnostic work, Lesley helps organisations move beyond simply looking at financial results to understand the behaviours and decision making that are driving them.

She is also the host of the Financial Judgement podcast and a regular speaker and contributor on leadership, financial decision making and the human impact of financial pressure.

Alongside her corporate work, Lesley is passionate about financial education. She is the author of *Parents, Let’s Talk Money!* and the creator of Money@School™ and Money@Home™, programmes designed to help young people develop practical financial understanding from an early age.

Lesley’s philosophy is simple: financial pressure does not just change the numbers. It changes people. And when you understand what is happening beneath the numbers, you can make better decisions, lead more effectively and protect the performance of the organisation.

Her work challenges leaders to look beyond the balance sheet and ask a more important question: what is financial pressure doing to the way we think, decide and lead?