Samantha Lassoff
Executive coach
Executive coach
Sam Lassoff is an executive coach at Sixth Wing. She works with founders, CEOs, and the senior leaders around them in the live moments that define a leader, a team, and a company's trajectory.
Sam has spent her career inside the institutions that decide who runs the world's most consequential companies and how those companies actually perform, at the highest levels of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. At Heidrick & Struggles, she spent seven years across the firm's Financial Services, Private Equity, and Venture Capital practices, running executive search and leadership assessment engagements for public companies, PE/VC firms, and PE/VC-backed companies. She founded Heidrick's people analytics function and served as the CHRO's key partner on succession, future of work, and the leadership decisions shaping firm strategy.
She then joined Human Capital, a venture capital firm focused on talent as the differentiator, where she led the firmwide research function and talent intelligence center of excellence, fielding the questions founders, investors, operating partners, and other leaders of Seed through Series C companies brought to her at the inflection points that determine whether a company scales or stalls.
From there, she was recruited to Blackstone, the world's largest alternative investment firm, as Vice President, Portfolio Talent & Organizational Performance. She built and ran the executive talent intelligence platform across the firm's portfolio companies and shaped Blackstone's portfolio-wide CHRO insights program, including the firm's first portfolio-wide CHRO survey, whose findings on inflation were featured in Bloomberg.
Every organization and every leader has an official version of itself and a real one, both of which are evolving. The work that matters happens in the space between them.
She spent her career in environments where those decisions carried real financial consequence. She saw what good judgment looked like under pressure, and what it cost when it was not there.
What Sam brings to coaching is the same instinct that drives her work as an operator: she sees what is happening underneath what people say is happening. She listens for the gap between the official version and the real one, and she names what leaders cannot name in themselves: the pattern they have stopped seeing, the trade-off they have yet to acknowledge, the strength they keep narrating as luck. The most impactful moments are live: a transition, a decision, a breakdown in execution, a team dynamic that has become structural.
Sam holds a BA in East Asian Studies from Columbia University, a Leadership & Performance Coaching Certification from Brown University, and an ICF Associate Certified Coach (ACC) credential.
She is the coach leaders call when they know the conventional answer is not the real one.
A native Manhattanite, Sam still calls the island home, currently with Zoe, her three-and-a-half-legged rescue dog.
