MORE ABOUT YELLOW CABLE

MY STORY

I left South Africa at 18 with nothing and spent the next twenty years building a career and a life in London - three degrees (a BCom in HR, an Honours in Industrial Psychology, an MBA from Kingston cum laude), then two decades in and adjacent to HR, talent, and organisational development at HSBC, De Beers, and Workday.

In late 2019 I said yes to moving back to South Africa. The timing turned out to be extraordinary in the worst way: a global pandemic, border shutdowns, and then a run of serious health crises through my family, including my own, all inside the same few years. I won't pretend that period was simple or that I came through it tidily. It wasn't, and I didn't.

What it gave me, though, was an honest look at what I wanted the next chapter to be - and at the work I'd actually been doing for twenty years underneath the job titles. Performance breakdowns inside organisations are rarely technical. They're relational. Under sustained pressure, behaviour shifts, judgement narrows, and dynamics that looked fine on paper start to crack. I'd watched it happen for two decades from inside and alongside HR and leadership teams. I just hadn't built anything specifically to address it.

So I got to work.

WHO I AM

I'm Ankia Coetzer, founder of Yellow Cable. I live between Cape Town and London - though, as I tell people, planet Earth is probably the more honest answer.

My own Enneagram type is a 6, in a trifix with 8 - which means I notice risk fast, and when something feels unsafe I move quickly to protect and correct. It's a useful instinct in a crisis and a sometimes clumsy one in an inbox. I work with this pattern daily, not above it: the value of this work for me personally hasn't been becoming calmer or endlessly self-aware, it's been shortening my own recovery time when I get it wrong, and catching the pattern before it costs me something with a client or a colleague. I don't ask leaders to do anything in a session I haven't first done on myself.

My approach is direct but never clinical. Challenging but always caring. I ask the tough questions, hold the space, and walk alongside you - whether you're building a culture from the ground up, navigating a complex team dynamic, or investing in your own leadership.

WHY THE ENNEAGRAM

No two leaders, teams, or organisations are the same - and the work shouldn't pretend otherwise.

Every engagement is shaped around your specific context. I draw on three integrated lenses:

The Enneagram - an incredibly powerful diagnostic tool to uncover core motivations, natural strengths, and the blind spots that quietly hold people back.

Maturity frameworks - an augmentation to the Enneagram data, to understand how individuals and teams make sense of complexity, change, and each other.

Real-world HR & Strategy expertise - twenty plus years translating insight into action inside actual organisations, not just theory.

Pairs methodology - the lens most frameworks skip. Most coaching is built for one of two units: the individual, or the whole team.

There's a third unit that's often where the real leverage sits : the pair. This is two co-founders carrying a company between them, a manager and their deputy, the two people whose working relationship quietly sets the tone for everyone below them and many other iterations of 2 people working towards a goal or outcome of some kind.

I'm faculty for Aephoria's Level 6 accreditation, the programme that trains other coaches and OD/HR professionals to use their Professional Pairs methodology - so this isn't a lens I've borrowed, it's one I teach.

It maps what actually happens between two specific people: where their patterns clash, where they compensate for each other, and where unexamined dynamics are quietly absorbing energy that should be going into the work.

Most expensive relationship problems don't start as HR issues - they start as two people whose patterns interact in ways nobody has named yet, and "they're not fighting" gets mistaken for "the relationship is working" until something breaks.

This lens catches it earlier.

All of this to say, the result you get is a process that's equal parts reflection and strategy. It’s one that helps your people see themselves more clearly, communicate with more confidence, and make decisions that hold up under pressure.

WHAT THIS MEANS FOR YOUR TEAM

This personal story isn't the pitch. It's the credential behind the pitch.

I didn't arrive at this work from a textbook. I arrived at it from twenty plus years inside HR watching the same pattern repeat: talented people and strong teams losing their edge not because of strategy or skill, but because pressure had quietly rewired how they related to each other, and then from living through enough disruption myself to know exactly what that pressure does to judgement, communication, and trust.

That's what I bring into a leadership team or a high-stakes working relationship: the ability to name what pressure is doing to your people before it shows up in your numbers.

Clarity for individuals. Strategy for teams. Growth for both.

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