Coaching services

Practitioner coaching – personalised support, supervision and development for organisational practitioners

I also provide consulting to HR managers on their coaching strategy: see Coaching approaches – a guide to HR departments (slide presentation)

Organisational professionals (consultants, facilitators and coaches), need to be supported like everyone else working in challenging and stressful work environments, perhaps more so.

I specialise in providing tailored support for other consultants and coaches. This can take different forms including coaching, supervision and specialist resourcing, depending upon your needs and purposes.

You may need someone to talk to about your own development, challenges and choices (i.e. coaching).

You may want someone to help you reflect upon what is happening within your client projects, to get a different perspective (supervision).

You may sometimes want someone to call up to discuss how to structure your approach to a project, or which models or tools to use in a situation and to point you in the right direction for other resources (human, professional, internet, etc) that you might need (resourcing).

My support of an organisational professional would start with a half day briefing and orientation session after which we would agree a particular programme or arrangement to suit your needs. This could start with a personal development review or not, and may involve regular face to face or telephone sessions, or ad-hoc sessions, according to your needs. We can work out a flexible contract whereby I charge you for the time I give you on a quarterly basis.

MSc in Change Agent Skills and Strategies with Surrey University– following which I have stayed up to date with new developments in change, leadership and learning and development and know more about all the different approaches, models and tools than any one else I know!
NLP – Practitioner course at NLPU with Robert Dilts
Psychosynthesis – four years training, applied supervision and personal therapy with the Institute of Psychosynthesis, which included training in psychotherapeutic and counselling skills (although I didn’t go down the therapy training and qualification route)
MSc Management Consultancy module tutor with Surrey University
Responsible for training management consultants for Merchants for several years
Running my own training courses and workshops for new and experienced organisational consultants
Training with Roger Evans in change leadership coaching as an associate with Creative Learning Consultants
Also see my one page profile

I draw upon a network of experienced colleagues to provide these services. Together we can provide regular coaching for change leaders within an organisation, to support them bring about change in their business. The focus of regular (e.g. monthly or bi-weekly) sessions can range from specific aspects of their own development as a change leader to working on the diagnosis, design, planning and implementation of current change programmes. This approach leaves the ownership and responsibility for change initiatives completely within the organisation, at the same time as giving the key leaders responsible the personal and professional support they need to make the change successful.

Tailored programmes (usually 3-12 months) can also designed to follow up participation on the Change Leadership course for a team of leaders.

• Managing people and cultural change is becoming a constant challenge within any organisations seeking to adapt and respond to changing customer needs and competitive market environments.

• Senior executives today are expected to be experts in change management as well as their own field of expertise and yet don’t have the time to attend lengthy external courses to help develop their competence.

• Behavioural change is frequently talked about and attempted without any in-depth understanding of how to bring it about through changing underlying attitudes, mindsets and beliefs.

• The people leading change are looked to as role models of the behavioural change they are advocating, but often are either unable to see their own behavioural blindspots or need help in learning new behaviours.

• Change programme sponsors often need to go through difficult behavioural change themselves when leading change within their organisations but don’t have a confidential and safe place in which to explore this and gain impartial feedback on their blind spots.
Benefits of change leadership coaching

• Helping increase capability and learn new behaviours whilst solving actual business problems and bringing about change

• Initial meeting and contracting; discussing needs and background to situation, agreeing objectives and outcomes, agreeing how to work together, structure of coaching programme, etc.

• Change leadership assessment; using profiling tools and 360° assessment if appropriate

• Regular coaching sessions; bi-weekly or monthly; 2 hour or half day; interim or ah-hoc phone conversations or email support between sessions.

• What would you most want to gain or achieve from change leadership coaching?
• What change management challenges are you currently facing?
• What are your key relationships and teams within this?
• Please describe any specific change programmes or initiatives you sponsoring or leading
• What are your needs within each of the four coaching orientations? Which of these would be your priorities?
• How would you describe your change leadership key strengths and weaknesses?
• Have you recently completed any leadership self-assessment or profiling exercises, or 360° assessment? If so, which? What did you learn from these?

The Head of a Customer Service Contact Centre in a bank had established the need to bring about culture change within his operation, specifically to bring together disparate sub-operations working within a silo mentality, into one cohesive and supportive team, as well as create a more achievement-oriented and enterprising culture. He identified a need to improve and develop his own competence as a change manager and we provided specific change management coaching sessions to address this. The sessions provided an additional benefit of building in time for a busy executive to reflect on the progress he had made and the issues he was facing, and was completed with time spent co-designing culture change workshops he might run with his team, with the option of external facilitation support.

This shows how we use the GROW model (developed by John Whitmore) as a simple framework for structuring coaching sessions. The following example has being made generic, and would be tailored to any specific situation. The coaching plan might take between 4-6 half day sessions.

Context - Explore your goals, objectives or desired outcomes for us working together.
• Business perspective – what has to change in the business?
• Personal development perspective - what are your developmental needs?
• What would you like to gain or learn from working together?

Goals – what do you want to achieve or bring about, over what time frames?
• Exploring your change management goals from personal and organisational perspectives.

Reality – what is the current situation and what are the cultural or change issues that need to be addressed?
• Diagnosis of the organisational culture in the operation and organisation.
• Current data, current analysis, current diagnosis and current strategy.
• Existing change initiatives at different levels of the organisation
• Overview of the models and tools that you could use for (i) culture or change diagnosis, (ii) human change management, e.g. change cycles, behavioural change tools, change coaching.
• Review of your own development needs as a change leader

Options – which strategies, solutions, resources and actions are available to you?
• Review of previous and current programmes, plans, initiatives, etc.
• Brainstorming new options
• Initial formulation of strategies

Will – what immediate steps can you take towards the resolution of your issues?
• Time frames – short, medium and long term
• Identifying immediate steps to release your will and create movement
• Action planning for the next period

• Review your personal and leadership development needs
• Explore your current personal and leadership development issues
• Formulate specific developmental objectives
• Set objectives for an on-going coaching programme if appropriate

This is a mini—coaching exercise which would involved three to four sessions and the use of relevant profiling tools after the first session.

The starting point in the first session is to help you explore where you are in your process of learning and development and also find out from you which forms of feedback or profiling you have used recently, so that we don’t duplicate effort in the review. If you have recently completed a 360° leadership or management feedback process, we would want to use the results from this, otherwise we would recommend that you carry out such an assessment and could provide the leadership assessment design if needed.

We will also use a selection of profiling tools that provide both horizontal views of your personality type or leadership styles (e.g. MBTI, Belbin or StrengthsFinder) as well as vertical models of development (e.g. Leadership Development Framework or Spiral Dynamics.

After the first session you would use the agreed assessment and profiling tools to create some useful personal data that we would reflect on together to help get beneath the surface of your developmental needs in the second session. We would be available by phone to discuss any issues arising out of the if needed. We will then prepare profiling outputs prior to the second sessions.

In the follow up session we will facilitate you to identify and prioritise your leadership and personal development needs. This stage is about exploring the gap between where you are and where you want to be, between your aspirations and the current reality. We would take a long term view of your personal development as the context for the leadership challenges you are currently facing. We may start to explore some of the behavioural patterns and supporting mind-sets or attitudes that might be holding you back from realising your full potential.
We would end by looking at how you might use a coach as well as other resources and relationships to help you address your development needs.

• What are your objectives for this review? What do you want to achieve from it?
• How would you describe your leadership role within your work?
• What key leadership challenges and issues you are facing?
• What do you consider to be your strengths and weaknesses as a leader?
• How do you see the relationship between personal development and leadership development?
• What personal or leadership development activity, courses or other input have you undertaken recently, formal or informally?
• Are there any wider issues of your personal development (or learning or change) you would like to reflect on within this review?