About Scott
A coach who understands the environment because he has operated in it.
Scott Ablin is the founder of Harken, an independent executive and career coaching practice for GTM professionals navigating leadership, career, and organizational challenges. Clients engage Harken and work directly with Scott.
Schedule a Good Talk
Experience behind Harken
More than 25 years inside GTM leadership.
As a five-time CMO, Scott has built and led GTM organizations in venture- and private equity-backed businesses, led growth and transformation efforts, participated in successful exits, and developed hundreds of professionals from emerging talent to experienced leaders.
He approaches each client's situation with curiosity and respect for its unique context. His experience brings a grounded understanding of the pace, language, competing expectations, and consequences that often shape the work.
Why coaching
Distance can change what becomes visible.
Highly capable people can struggle when they become too close to a situation to view it clearly. Competing expectations can pull them in several directions, and familiar approaches may stop producing the results they once did.
Coaching creates room to step back, sort through what is happening, and decide how to respond.
Coach training and experience
Formal training, practical context, direct experience.
Scott is a Certified Executive Coach and Certified Career Coach through the Center for Executive Coaching and a member of the International Coaching Federation.
His professional coach training is complemented by direct coaching experience and decades spent developing people, leading teams, advising executives, and navigating the environments in which his clients operate.
How Scott coaches
Thoughtful, direct, practical, and client-owned.
Thoughtful
Create room to slow down, listen carefully, and understand what sits beneath the presenting issue.
Direct
Question assumptions, surface contradictions, and name patterns when doing so can move the work forward.
Practical
Connect what you discover to a decision, conversation, behavior, or commitment you can carry into the work.
Client-Owned
You define what matters, make the decisions, and own the action. Scott provides structure, challenge, and support.
Informed by Experience
Scott's background informs how he listens, questions, and recognizes context. Coaching remains the foundation.
Why the name Harken
Pause, pay attention, and hear what the pace can obscure.
Harken means to listen attentively or give thoughtful consideration to what is being said. That may mean listening more carefully to your own thinking, to the people affected by your leadership, or to realities that do not fit the preferred story.
Slow down. Pay attention. Harken.
A note on fit
Trust and fit matter in coaching.
Relevant experience may create an initial connection. A productive relationship also requires confidence in Scott's style and approach.
A Good Talk initial conversation provides an opportunity to determine whether the need is appropriate for coaching and whether there is a strong enough foundation for the work. If another kind of support or another professional would be more appropriate, Scott will say so.
In their words
With Scott having been at the highest executive level, I have found him to be fearless in asking thoughtful and also unexpected questions to get me thinking and reflecting. As a coach, he creates an environment where it is safe to explore possibilities. Because of his deep executive experience, he also offers perspectives when and where appropriate- not in an imposing way, more for provoking more thinking and instigating insight. I would highly recommend Scott as a coach for you to consider.
Johnny L.Total Rewards Consultant & Certified Executive Coach
Start with a conversation.
A Good Talk is an opportunity to discuss what you are navigating and whether coaching, and Harken specifically, may be right for you.
Schedule a Good TalkNo charge. No obligation. A thoughtful 30-minute conversation with Scott.