Introduction
When Reverend Dr Kate Coleman told her best friend she'd become a Christian, the friend put the phone down and didn't speak to her again for years. It was the first, but not the last, time Coleman would learn what a genuine calling actually costs. Now the first Black woman accredited as a Baptist minister in the UK, with 35 years across church, charity, business and even the United Nations, she argues that most leaders confuse the wrong things: they mistake change for transformation, and they think curiosity is a luxury rather than the baseline of doing the job at all.
A Quiet, Bookish Child in a Country That Made Sure She Knew She Was Different
Coleman was born in Ghana, came to the UK via Nigeria at around three or four years old, and landed as part of one of the first Black African families in her school and neighbourhood, a fact she says everyone around her made sure she was aware of. She describes herself as a quiet, thoughtful, watchful child, the kind who bumped into lampposts because she was reading while walking, in a household of louder, more outgoing siblings. She learned early, through repeated teasing at school, to find a way of expressing herself that discouraged others from continuing to target her.
That early wariness, she suggests looking back, was the first seed of the curiosity that would define her career: a habit of paying close attention to a room before deciding how to move through it.
Wanting to Be a Poet, Becoming a Biochemist to Please Her Father
Asked by her headteacher what she wanted to be when she grew up, a young Coleman answered clearly: a poet. Her father, sitting beside her, cleared his throat and corrected the record on her behalf. She wanted to be a doctor, he said. Coming from a West African household where success meant one of a small handful of professions, medicine chief among them, that ambition wasn't really up for negotiation.
Coleman's compromise was biochemistry and pharmacology, close enough to medicine to satisfy her father, distant enough from clinical practice to reflect what actually interested her. She genuinely grew to love biomedical science and considered pursuing pharmacognosy, the study of medicinal plants, with an eye toward doing meaningful work back in Ghana. None of it was really the plan. She's glad, in hindsight, that she did it anyway.
A Damascus Road Moment That Cost Her a Friendship
At university, actively avoiding Christians after years at a church school, Coleman ended up close friends with someone who turned out to be one. A single conversation, sparked by curiosity rather than conviction, led to a sudden and total conversion experience within weeks, what she calls her own Damascus Road moment. She called her best friend, with whom she'd been studying the Quran, that same night to share the news. The friend's response, "do you know what you've done?", was followed by years of silence.
Her father's reaction to her subsequent shift from biomedical science into ministry was no warmer. He'd had a difficult relationship with the UK church and had hoped for a doctor in the family. He didn't come to terms with her calling for many years; her mother embraced it far more quickly. Coleman is clear that she went into her faith with her eyes open about the cost, not with what she calls rose-tinted glasses about an easy life that following Jesus would supposedly guarantee.
Becoming the First: The Weight and the Purpose of Breaking Ceilings
Coleman didn't set out to become the first Black woman accredited as a Baptist minister in the UK. She's direct that had she fully understood in advance how difficult being "the first" in any space tends to be, she might have moved more cautiously. Instead, she moved forward simply trying to honour what she understood as God's call on her life and the gifts she'd been given, and found herself repeatedly the first in rooms she hadn't set out to conquer.
She doesn't pretend the position is weightless. The more aware she became of occupying a unique space, often the only Black person or the only woman in a room, the more aware she became of others who needed that space held open behind her. Her response has been deliberate: to build the tools and the path so that people coming after her don't have to reinvent what she already had to build from nothing, freeing them to focus on the specific changes they alone are called to make.
Discerning God's Voice From Her Own
One of Coleman's more practical teachings addresses a question many leaders quietly struggle with: how do you tell your own voice apart from a genuine calling, or from the noise of everyone else's opinion? She names three competing voices at play in any moment of discernment, her own, other people's, and God's, and admits that distinguishing between them has taken years of practice, including plenty of times she got it wrong before getting it right.
She points to the biblical story of Elijah, a prophet used to dramatic, unmistakable signs of God's presence, who eventually encounters God not in an earthquake or a fire but in what scripture calls a still, small voice. The lesson she draws is that recognising a genuine calling doesn't require constant spectacle. Often, she says, it's in the most difficult, quietest circumstances that the signal comes through clearest.
Living Parables: Turning a Catastrophic Year Into a Book
Coleman's second book, Metamorph, was born out of 2022, a year she describes as one where almost everything that could go wrong did: five major operations between her and her business partner, family struggles, bereavements, and financial pressure arriving from every direction at once. Alongside her personal crisis sat a wider one, the leadership world reckoning, in the wake of George Floyd, with a wave of senior leaders across sectors, including within the church, being exposed for serious misconduct.
Out of that convergence came two phrases she now uses constantly. She encourages people to look for the "fingerprints of God" even in circumstances that feel dominated by the "bootprints of the enemy", not because hardship is engineered by God, but because it can still be used to build something. And she describes moments of struggle as "living parables": who you are becoming through a difficult season, she argues, is as important as whatever specific outcome you're hoping for.
Change Versus Transformation, and Why Curiosity Is the Baseline of Leadership
Coleman draws a sharp distinction most leaders collapse without noticing. Change is when something new begins. Transformation, the idea behind her book's title, is when something old has to completely fall apart first, the way a caterpillar doesn't simply grow wings but dissolves entirely inside its cocoon before anything resembling a butterfly can emerge. Genuine transformation, in other words, cannot be rushed or faked, and it always costs something on the way through.
Curiosity, she argues, is the non-negotiable ingredient underneath both. She points to organisations like Kodak and Nokia as cautionary examples of what happens when senior leadership stops asking real questions about a changing context. Failing at curiosity, in her framing, particularly for anyone senior enough to shape an organisation's direction, is functionally the same as failing at leadership itself, a failure that eventually catches up with you regardless of how strong your earlier track record was.
Twenty-Five Years of Partnership Built on Radical Honesty
Asked how she has sustained both a friendship and a business partnership with her Next Leadership co-founder for over two decades, Coleman's answer centres on deliberately valuing genuine difference rather than wanting, as she puts it, a mini me. She's specific that her co-founder covers her own blind spots precisely because they think and work so differently, and that this friction is a feature of the partnership, not a flaw to smooth over.
Her other rule is total honesty without cruelty: speaking your truth, letting the other person speak theirs, and building a culture where nothing said threatens to blow up the relationship. She trusts her co-founder to deliver hard news precisely because she knows it comes from care about who she's becoming, not an attempt to undermine her, a distinction she says she deliberately looks for in anyone she lets close.
