Services

Using up-to-date tools and techniques, I will establish what you want to improve upon, analyse your current situation and produce a plan, which will support you in moving you to your desired position. My approach is one of keeping it simple and creating impact from day one. The first challenge is in overcoming ambiguity.

Many organisations have paid good money to big consultancy firms only to be left with confusing processes and systems, which they cannot then manage themselves, and so the cycle of seeking more support commences. I start from the position of developing and transferring skills and competencies across to my host organisation. You need to pick up and run with whatever I leave behind – this is a process of embedding improvement.

1. Developing Communications and Engagement teams from a position of underperformance and dysfunction, to one of effective and impactful team working which added value to their organisation’s goals;
2. Developing a Governing Body from a position of selection and election to one of competent leadership of a newly constituted body;
3. Developing a whole directorate effort from a position of routine slow output to it’s first commercially available product and timely customer products.

Coaching and mentoring are ‘helping behaviours’ used to support personal development over shorter and longer periods respectively. It includes techniques based on the use of one-to-one discussions to enhance an individual’s skills, knowledge or work performance. It is possible to draw distinctions between coaching and mentoring, although in practice, the two terms are often used interchangeably.

Mentoring involves the use of the same models and skills of questioning, listening, clarifying and reframing associated with coaching. However, mentoring in the workplace tends to describe a relationship in which a more experienced individual uses his or her greater knowledge and understanding of the work, workplace or sector to support the development of a more junior or inexperienced member of staff, over a longer period of time.

• Has your career seemed to have just happened so far?
• Have your career moves to date been unplanned or just seemed to have happened?
• Are you attracted to opportunities you believe you could do but fail to put anything into place to make them happen?
• Do you know how to go about getting appropriate career progressions?
• Do you find yourself having to deal with less than ideal career issues – maybe you describe yourself as either lucky or unlucky a lot of the time?
• Would you like to achieve more than you have to date?
• Do you have a personal picture of what your idea of a successful and fulfilling career is?
• Do you want to be able to have clarity about where you could be on a career path in 2/3/5 years time but you don’t want it to take over your life?
• Do you often wonder how you can improve your chances of reaching the potential you, or others, once had for yourself?
• Do you often wonder how bosses and colleagues could possibly see things in the way that they do?

• It is a non-directive form of development, though this is not a hard and fast rule;
• It focuses on improving performance and developing individuals’ skills;
• Personal issues may be discussed but the emphasis is on performance at work;
• Coaching activities have both organisational and individual goals;
• It provides people with feedback on both their strengths and their weaknesses; and
• It is a skilled activity, which should be delivered by people who are trained to do so.

One key distinction is that mentoring relationships tend to be longer term than coaching arrangements. This is particularly productive when used to encourage inclusive working practices and equal opportunities.

• Helping competent technical experts develop better their interpersonal or managerial skills;
• Developing several individual’s potential and providing career support;
• Developing a more strategic perspective after a promotion to a more senior role; and
• Helping work through the handling of conflict situations so that those situations are resolved effectively.