Thirty years in the room.
Rareș Manolescu
I'm an executive team coach and strategy consultant based in Romania, working across 37 countries and five continents. Thirty years in training and facilitation, twenty of them in coaching — alongside the people who carry the weight of the decisions.
My background is in law — a Bachelor's from Oradea and a Master's from Cluj — which is where the insistence on evidence and precision comes from. I don't repeat motivational folklore; I work from what the research actually supports.
I'm a systemic coach, trained at Metasystème Coaching Academy (France) and Coach Masters Academy (Singapore), a Master Trainer for Blanchard®, and a certified Human Synergistics consultant. I've studied and applied Self-Determination Theory since 2013, including partnering with Prof. Susan Fowler to expand the Optimal Motivation framework.
I work with two kinds of people: the CEOs and leadership teams who set the direction, and the coaches who help others lead. The good news is they need the same thing — a clearer, more honest way to think about what moves people.
Outside the room: kiteboarding, snowboarding, mountain biking, martial arts, and drawing.
3,500+ coaching hours · 20,000+ workshop participants · 5 continents.
Where it counts.
Two leadership teams, one direction
A €5.5Bn energy group brought two executive teams together after a merger. Over nine months, we turned an uneasy pairing into a single, aligned leadership team.
Leading through a B.A.N.I. world
A leadership team facing brittle, non-linear conditions needed decisions that would hold under pressure. We built the alignment — and the nerve — to lead through volatility.
Integrating a new CEO
A multinational needed a new leader and their team to click quickly. We compressed months of ramp-up into weeks of real, working alignment.
Trusted at the top.
A selection of the organisations I work with — across industries and across 37 countries.
What leaders say.
Our cooperation was indeed very constructive and valuable. Thanks to your outstanding capabilities, you gave us a great support in our transformation journey. And I would be delighted to recommend you.
I had the privilege of working with Rareș and I cannot recommend him highly enough as a leadership coach. From our very first session, it was clear that Rareș possesses a profound understanding of leadership dynamics and a unique ability to facilitate growth in others. His insightful approach generates in others a lot of confidence and clarity.
I have been fortunate to be coached by Rareș. Thanks to his excellent coaching skills and techniques, his knowledge and experience, his charisma and professionalism, I achieved my desired results very shortly, I’ve got clarity about what I want and don’t want and, more importantly, about how to get there.
Rareș was the first trainer who taught me about leadership. There is not a single day without me remembering his great lessons, without applying the situational leadership principles I learned from him. He is a great teacher and coach and I consider myself fortunate to have started my leadership career with such guidance.
Rareș is an excellent trainer and coach. He knows how to set up a team development process in an international context which will deliver its results from the first day after the initial workshop. Being always on the search for more wisdom, Rareș is up to date on the topics he works on.
Who I build with.
The international partners I design and deliver programmes with.
The coaches I work with.
With 18 years in marketing and advertising and more than 400 hours of coaching, I step in exactly where the blockage shows: in the team, in how people communicate, make decisions and relate to one another. From there, together with the leaders, I build the clarity and direction that sustain this change over the long term. The process combines systemic coaching, NLP and the Process Communication Model, to unlock both team communication and alignment on a shared mission and values.
The result: teams that make decisions autonomously, communicate openly and are aligned on a common direction — without the leader having to be involved in the process all the time.
I believe nothing happens by chance. An engineer by training, I discovered early on that I would rather work with people and be part of their story of growth than get my ears caught in all sorts of circuits — and for more than 20 years that is what I have been doing, with pleasure and passion.
I have facilitated very diverse groups, indoors and outdoors, from a handful of people to more than 500, in organisations ranging from NGOs to multinationals — automotive, banking, IT, insurance, FMCG, retail.
I create spaces where people learn and speak openly. I design processes, build agendas and exercises, then hold them with structure: on time and over time. In the room I stay impartial and make sure no one is left unheard — I skilfully temper dominant voices, listen without judging, and dance with both silence and chaos. I make what seems complicated to many look simple.
I work with leaders and leadership teams — individually, but above all I train the relationship between them: that is where a team gets stuck or unstuck. I speak from what I have lived, not from theory.
Most of the CEOs and founders I work with have built something solid. And yet, when they want to accelerate — to scale, to enter a new segment, to seize an opportunity that won’t wait — the same question comes up: who do you give the responsibility to? Yesterday’s performance does not guarantee today’s capacity.
I spent 25 years in commercial organisations — leading sales, operations and customer-experience teams, as a director and as a member of an executive board. I built commercial structures from scratch and saw from the inside what an organisation that executes looks like, and one that gets stuck in itself.
I work with CEOs, founders and their teams, always starting from the business goals: which perspectives need to change, which capabilities need developing, which system needs building so the organisation can execute its chosen direction. The people do the work; I bring the tools and methods — and they stay in the organisation after our collaboration ends.
Through BrightMonday I have worked with companies in insurance, FMCG, retail, technology, investment funds and services.
