Dr. Liz Bywater is an internationally recognized expert in organizational performance. A top-tier leadership consultant, strategic advisor, and executive coach, she specializes in helping senior executives and leadership teams navigate high-stakes organizational challenges to drive meaningful growth, accelerate innovation, and achieve extraordinary outcomes. As founder and president of Bywater Consulting Group, she has spent nearly 25 years helping Fortune 500 companies and high-growth organizations build courageous leadership, align executive teams, and drive extraordinary performance in times of rapid growth and meaningful transformation.
Dr. Bywater is a member of the prestigious Million Dollar Consulting® Hall of Fame, distinguishing her as one of the leading experts in her field. With a PhD in Psychology and deep expertise in leadership development, she has established herself as a trusted advisor to C-suite executives navigating complexity, leading transformations, and managing through crisis.
Dr. Bywater has worked with over 1,000 executives and teams across an array of organizations such as: Johnson & Johnson, DePuy Synthes, Ethicon, AmerisourceBergen (now Cencora), Bristol-Myers Squibb, Kite/Gilead, Spark/Roche, Hikma Pharmaceuticals, Zydus Pharmaceuticals, Exact Sciences/Abbott, Atlantic Health System, Eisenhower Health, Nike, Thomson Reuters, Northrop Grumman, Aramark, VSE, Widener University, and KLX/Boeing.
Her work encompasses C-suite advisory engagements, executive coaching, leadership team integration, board dynamics, commercial transformation, succession readiness, and organizational optimization, with particular focus on high-stakes transitions and complex transformations. She has worked across the C-Suite, directly helping CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CCOs, CIOs, CTOs, CMOs, CNOs, Presidents, and Boards of Directors.
Executive Coaching for High-Stakes Leadership
Dr. Bywater frequently advises senior executives leading through critical transitions, managing complexity, and stepping into significantly expanded roles. Her coaching combines strategic business thinking with deep understanding of organizational psychology and human behavior, helping executives build both capability and confidence to lead courageously and with deep impact.
Representative work includes: CEO coaching during organizational turnarounds, CFO coaching through major transformations, executive team coaching for boards of directors, and succession readiness for next-generation leaders.
Executive Team Integration & Alignment
Dr. Bywater specializes in helping executive teams function as genuinely integrated units, which is particularly critical during mergers, acquisitions, leadership transitions, and periods of intense pressure. She helps teams move beyond surface-level alignment to build the trust, candor, shared accountability, and operating rhythms that drive sustained results.
Representative engagements include: post-merger integration for pharmaceutical companies, leadership team alignment for health systems under financial pressure, commercial team transformation for biotech firms, and executive team effectiveness during organizational pivots.
Healthcare & Life Sciences Leadership
With extensive experience in the healthcare, medtech, and pharmaceutical sectors, Dr. Bywater understands the unique challenges these organizations face: regulatory complexity, clinical/operational balance, physician leadership dynamics, payer-provider relationships, and the pressure of managing both business performance and patient/safety outcomes.
She has partnered with health systems, pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, and medical device companies to address C-suite team development, commercial transformation, leadership team integration, board-CEO dynamics, and executive leadership during periods of rapid growth and organizational crisis.
Organizations Under Pressure
Dr. Bywater partners with leadership teams facing intense external and/or internal pressure: from boards demanding rapid results, market forces requiring significant adaptation, organizational turnarounds, and critical strategic inflection points. She helps teams commit to genuine alignment and strategic clarity to accelerate results, drive profitable growth, and thrive even in moments of profound pressure.
The Slow Down to Speed Up® Methodology
Dr. Bywater pioneered the proprietary Slow Down to Speed Up® methodology, based on her book Slow Down to Speed Up: Lead, Succeed and Thrive in a 24/7 World. The core tenet of her framework is that top results aren’t achieved by going ever faster but, paradoxically, by deliberately slowing down. She advises her clients to slow down just long enough to strategize, communicate, align with stakeholders, build trust, reflect on successes to be replicated and mistakes to be avoided, assess the environment, drive momentum toward a brilliant future, and make crucial decisions with intention and clarity.
Speaking & Thought Leadership
Dr. Bywater is a sought-after speaker on leadership effectiveness, organizational transformation, and executive team dynamics. Recent speaking engagements include Cornell Alumni Leadership Association, industry summits, and management forums.
Engagement Approach
Dr. Bywater works with a select number of clients at any given time to ensure deep partnership and sustained results. Engagements typically range from strategic advisory and executive coaching for individual leaders to comprehensive leadership team integration and organizational optimization initiatives.
Bywater Consulting Group, LLC | Based in Yardley, Pennsylvania | Serving clients locally, nationally and internationally