Maëlle Costa
Founder, Bright Shift
Leadership teams need more than advice. They need someone who can get in, see clearly, and move things forward.
I partner with leaders to turn complexity into clarity, and strategy into results: clarifying what matters, aligning leadership and teams, and turning plans into execution that actually delivers.
My job is to make myself obsolete, on purpose. The measure of an engagement isn't my impact in the moment; it's what still works six months after I've gone.
Career
Over twelve years advising executives, from Director to C-suite, on growth, transformation and complexity. I trained on one side at BCG — in rigor and business acumen — and on the other in political science and constitutional law: the study of how power is actually distributed in a room, how interests come into tension, and the structures that let people disagree without everything falling apart. Since then I've brought the two together, and after a decade in SaaS tech, including some of LinkedIn's fastest-changing years, I now bring clients that dual lens: business and cultural.
Complex, internationally spread environments have always surfaced the problems that draw me: navigating differences of culture, language and expectation, and helping people flex toward each other rather than past each other. At LinkedIn, that appetite met speed: I watched hypergrowth up close, and saw directly how much the quality of leadership decided whether a team could genuinely embark on change together, or only survive it.
Since founding Bright Shift, I help leadership teams navigate change without losing alignment or momentum. I show up when a leadership team is mid-storm: a reorganization, a transition, or a moment when no one is sure how to approach something. I read the situation, work out what is actually at play, and get the organization moving again: clarifying decisions, aligning leadership, and rebuilding structure so execution doesn’t stall.
France-based, globally shaped. Worked with teams across the US, Brazil, Europe, the Middle East, Singapore and Australia.
Core values
Empathy & people centricity
Reading people before reading process; understanding someone’s style and context before proposing structure. Decision rights, cadence, frameworks will only be adopted when built around how your people actually work together, not imposed on top of it.
Efficiency & simplicity
Most complex situations boil down to simple core issues. I investigate and diagnose, getting to the core of what’s actually wrong, then untangling the complexity that grew around it, not adding more. You want a sustainable outcome, one that runs without human toil and that is simple to operate.
Candor for impact
I’m here to advise and to maximize your impact. Sugarcoating a hard truth only delays the fix. I’ll share my view and the options I see candidly, and confidentially. Where relevant and when agreed, I provide direct constructive coaching to key people in the organization to unblock friction.