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
Reading people before reading process; understanding someone’s style and context before proposing structure. Not a soft skill on the side: it’s the working tool that makes the rest of this possible.
People before process
Decision rights, cadence, frameworks: they only work when they’re built around how your people actually work together, not imposed over it.
Impact, measured twice
In the numbers: decisions made, initiatives delivered, on time. And in the people: teams that stay aligned, stay engaged, and want to stay.