Coralie Deglon
Business Optimization
Coalition Culture
Coralie Deglon is an FP&A Manager at Coalition Culture with a career shaped by curiosity, courage, and global experience. After leaving France at twenty-one without a fixed plan, she built a fifteen-plus-year career across four continents by bridging finance and operations, leading through influence, and helping teams find clarity through data. Her journey offers powerful lessons on leadership, confidence, and growth.
Building Impact by Bridging Finance and Operations: Coralie discovered early on that numbers alone never tell the full story. While working in manufacturing, she noticed gaps between what spreadsheets showed and what was actually happening on the operations floor. By spending time where the work happened and asking questions, she helped teams reframe problems, quantify impact, and uncover opportunities for improvement. This ability to connect data with reality became a defining strength in her career.
Learning to Be Comfortable Being Uncomfortable: Moving across South America, Europe, Asia, and the U.S. taught Coralie that growth starts before confidence does. She believes progress comes from action, not waiting to feel ready. Her advice is simple but powerful: pick a direction, start even if you feel unqualified, and keep going with curiosity and joy. By taking small steps and trying new things regularly, confidence naturally follows.
Leadership Without Titles: For Coralie, leadership has little to do with hierarchy and everything to do with trust. She has driven meaningful transformation by working alongside teams, listening deeply, and earning credibility through collaboration. Whether redesigning processes or solving complex cost challenges, she focuses on respect and shared ownership, proving that influence is built through relationships, not job titles.
Data as a Tool for Clarity and Alignment: Coralie sees data as a way to remove confusion and emotion from decision-making. When teams clearly define what success looks like in numbers, conversations become more productive and aligned. Data helps shorten debates, surface real issues, and ensure everyone is working from the same version of truth. She emphasizes that people want to do good work, but they need clarity to do it well.
Staying Relevant in a World Shaped by AI: As technology evolves, Coralie encourages professionals to start using AI now rather than waiting. She treats tools like ChatGPT as a junior analyst or thinking partner, using them to summarize information, challenge assumptions, and save time on repetitive tasks. Her approach is practical and accessible: dedicate a small amount of time each week, provide clear context, and ask better questions to unlock real value.
Advice for Women in Chemicals: Coralie’s journey is a reminder that careers do not need to follow a straight line to be successful. By embracing uncertainty, leading with humanity, and using data as a compass, it is possible to create impact anywhere in the world. Her story encourages women to act boldly, trust themselves, and grow through the process rather than waiting for perfection.
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