Dr. Nancy Sobel

Dr. Nancy Sobel is the most recent addition to ExecSearches’ staff. As a consultant, career advisor, and executive development coach, she has worked with thousands of clients at all levels, from those entering the job market to senior management and search committees for leadership in academic medical centers. Nancy has worked with non-profits of all shapes, sizes and colors, from small domestic violence organizations to the international universities.

As a coach and consultant Nancy is an active listener with a straightforward, collaborative, and compassionate style. Her commitment is that clients distinguish success at each step along his or her path and obtain rewarding employment in organizations with core values that speak to them. She supports her clients in helping them hone their senses of clarity, purpose, and authentic self-expression, and to look at whatever might stop him/her from being in effective action. She may assist them in improving underdeveloped skills and cultivate competencies s/he may not have known they have to develop her/his own full potential, and to expand their prospects in the marketplace. This is often beneficial to their respective teams and organizations as well. She is a firm believer that leadership is a cultivated behavior, built out of qualities intrinsic to everyone and that true leadership in organizations is the ultimate in flexibility and succession planning. Nancy finds it particularly rewarding to work with those developing the relational skills to advance from technical acumen to managerial and leadership excellence.

Nancy began her professional career in as a physician concentrating in women’s healthcare and biochemical endocrinology. Committed to make a bigger difference in healthcare than she could as a solo or clinical team contributor she made a transition to retained executive search when her interviewer pointed out that the transferable skills she had developed as a physician would allow her to support healthcare and other non-profits by recruiting leadership into those organizations. After completing a master’s degree in business, she joined Isaacson, Miller where she met Jay and Karen.

Dr. Sobel holds an MD and PhD from the University of Chicago and completed her post graduate training at the University of Chicago Hospitals and Clinics and Yale New Haven Hospital. Her doctoral thesis centered around the marker now used to distinguish ER+ breast cancer, and as a graduate student she was privileged to work with Dr. Charles Huggins, winner of the Nobel Price for his discovery of the hormonal responsiveness of prostate cancer.

Following over a decade of clinical practice Dr. Sobel earned her MBA focused on organizational development from the Simmons College School of Management in 1997 and completed her Advanced Physician Development certification from the Physician Coaching Institute in 2010. She keeps her medical license and board certifications current, which she finds supports her effectiveness as a career development coach. Prior to her mid-career transition she held academic appointments in Ob/Gyn and Reproductive Biology at Harvard Medical School, Northeastern University, and Tufts University School of Medicine. During the pandemic she worked with Partners in Health as a COVID tracer, where she continued to be inspired by the nexus of mission and expertise.

An accomplished barista Nancy makes a latte that is out of this world. She delights in creating beauty around her, as an avid gardener and residential redeveloper, where she honors the heritage of the older homes she transforms while bringing them into the 21st Century. She loves to travel and rounds out her entrepreneurial portfolio by teaching English as a Foreign Language to students from all over the world.