I have spent 30 years learning what great leadership looks like. Formation Academy exists to pass that on.
My Story
I did not set out to become a leadership coach.
I set out to build things. Scale companies. Lead teams. Solve the hard problems that keep founders and executives awake at night.
For more than thirty years, that is what I did.
From the trading floors of Citibank and Deutsche Bank, to global leadership roles at HSBC, to helping scale Builder.ai from 250 people to more than 1,000 across eight countries, I have spent my career operating where growth, complexity and pressure collide.
I have been the new manager trying to prove myself. The senior leader carrying difficult decisions. The executive responsible for outcomes when there were no easy answers. I know what leadership looks like from the inside because I have lived it.
What surprised me was that some of the most important conversations I had were never about strategy, budgets or performance metrics.
They were about people.
A leader wondering whether they were ready for the next step. A manager struggling with a difficult team situation. A talented individual trying to find their voice in a room full of stronger personalities.
Years after we had worked together, people would still reach out for those conversations.
Eventually, I realised something.
The part of leadership I found most rewarding was not building organisations. It was helping people grow inside them.
Formation Academy was built from that realisation.
Not as a theory of leadership, but as a practical way to help ambitious people navigate the challenges, decisions and pressures that come with leading in the real world.
The Turning Point
Some of my most formative experiences as a leader came early — at Citibank and Deutsche Bank. I worked alongside people who were exceptional at what they did, and I watched closely. The leaders who left a mark were never the ones who had all the answers. They were the ones who asked the best questions, who made space for others to develop, and who understood that their job was to make the people around them better. I carried that with me.
After Deutsche Bank, I had the privilege of working at Bridgewater Associates — one of the most demanding and intellectually rigorous environments in the world. Ray Dalio built something unlike anything I had encountered before: a culture where radical transparency was not a value written on a wall, but the operating system of the entire firm. Where every idea was challenged, regardless of who it came from. Where being wrong was not a weakness — hiding the fact that you were wrong was.
It changed how I think about leadership permanently.
That lesson stayed with me as I moved into increasingly senior roles. Across every organisation I worked in — without exception — I saw the same pattern: people promoted into leadership because they were exceptional at their jobs, handed a team, and left to figure out the rest on their own.
The problem was never talent. It was that we as an industry have built a culture of promoting people into leadership and leaving them there — without the support, the community, or the ongoing development they need to thrive.
I decided to do something about it.
Why Formation
Formation Academy is built on a simple belief: the leaders who will shape your business in five years are already inside it. They just need the right environment to grow — together.
The name says it. In aviation, a formation is not one aircraft leading and the rest following. It is a group flying in alignment — each one making the others stronger, more stable, more capable than they would be alone. That is what we build.
Not individual leaders. Leadership teams.
Credentials
Chief Operating Officer — Builder.ai
Scaled operations from 250 to over 1,000 employees across eight countries. Guided the company from Series A through Series D funding. Grew delivery output by 500%.
Managing Director — HSBC Bank
Americas Chief Operating Officer for Global Markets. Global Head of Corporate Digital. Global Chief Operating Officer for Currencies and Commodities. Decade-long tenure spanning regulatory, digital transformation, and large-scale operational leadership.
Earlier Career
Deutsche Bank (Managing Director), Bridgewater Associates (Head of Execution Trading), Vinya Capital (Partner and President), Citibank.
Education
Harvard Business School Advanced Management Program. Bachelor of Science in Finance and Economics, Saint John's University.
Beyond the Boardroom
Mentor at Techstars and Level39. Former mentor at the BUILD High School Entrepreneurial Program. Former Ambassador to the Women in the Chief Operating Officer Community through Armstrong Wolfe. Featured guest on Barry O'Reilly's UNLEARN Podcast — "Living Your Leadership Principles to Learn and Unlearn."
Philosophy
I am not an academic. I am a practitioner.
Everything I teach, I have lived. The hard conversations. The failed promotions. The teams that fell apart and the ones that became something extraordinary. The moments where vulnerability turned out to be the most powerful leadership tool in the room.
I believe leadership is learned — not bestowed. I believe the best leaders are built in community, not isolation. And I believe that the companies who invest in developing their managers together, before they reach the top, will build something that lasts.
That is what Formation is for.
Personal
Joe is married with four children. He lives between London and the United States. Outside of work, he can usually be found on a tennis court, on hikes, in the kitchen, or deep in a book.