Coaching, Training and Team Development
Services
Coaching
My coaching is designed to work at your pace, unlock your potential and support you to overcome challenges. This might be to help you think through a service challenge, hold a tricky conversation, manage a performance issue or to puzzle out your next personal career step. Coaching is:
- Voluntary - you enter coaching willingly and prepared to do the work to make the change you want to see.
- Confidential - with some limited exceptions, the conversations in coaching are confidential between us.
- Time limited - We will agree the timing, frequency and number of sessions depending on what you want and what you can commit to.
Coaching can be online or face to face and a coaching session is an hour or 90 minutes. If we are working face to face I come to your premises so you don't have to allocate travel time.
Coaching Showcase: a valued space to plan, reflect and deliver on objectives
An experienced clinician, recently appointed to an interim team leadership role, sought coaching to help her:
- Make the transition from peer to manager
- Develop an effective management style to deliver key service projects in a tight timescale
- Address performance issues and attitude/behaviour issues with 2 team members
Over the course of four coaching sessions we worked together to enable her to have challenging conversations with each of the two team members. This led to a shift in her confidence to progress from the informal to the formal stages of the HR procedures in one case. With the other person she achieved an informal resolution of the performance concern. The opportunity to reflect on her management style enabled her to appreciate her transferable skills and to identify effective ways to combine her clinician and manager role as she led a significant service change.
“I found it particularly helpful to practice getting the words right for me before having the conversations for real”.
"As a clinician I aim to advise, guide and listen and the patient accepts my expertise. As a manager I have had to resolve to be more direct and hold people to account”.
Training
I have many years’ experience in designing and delivering effective leader and manager development programmes. I focus on the skills of communication, feedback, and enabling change. Each course draws on my years working in large complex organisations, sound management and leadership theory, and a highly practical approach which aims to equip participants with techniques to use in their workplace.
Programmes are tailored to the needs of the organisation and the participant group so they are not standard off-the-shelf products. They combine the benefits of external delivery with the knowledge of an in-house training expert.
Training showcase: Coaching Skills for Managers Programme
Developed with my associate, Julia Gardner, Coaching Skills for Managers offers participants the opportunity to explore and develop a coaching style of management. With the many challenges facing organisations today, a coaching style aims to achieve the engagement and commitment of staff. This programme combines a training and coaching approach to enable participants to transfer their classroom learning to their daily leadership and management practices.
To find out more about the Coaching Skills for Managers programme or any of the training programmes I can develop with you please contact me:
Group Coaching
A coaching group is a great place to work with peers to address leadership and management challenges. Each person brings a real and current issue where they want to enable change. Over the life of the group, they learn coaching techniques to support and challenge each other as they work to bring about real change.
As the group leader I have a dual purpose; to manage the group process and to give feedback and support around the development of coaching behaviours. Participants gain the tools to address the management challenge they have brought with them and they enhance their effectiveness by gaining valuable coaching tools and techniques also.
Group coaching showcase
In an evaluation of group coaching delivered at a large NHS Trust, 92% of participants identified that they had made a positive change as a result of the group coaching programme. The changes included:
- Finding new approaches to long standing challenges including, holding staff to account for performance, managing punctuality, addressing sickness absences and initiating appraisals and training.
- Developing confidence to assert themselves.
- Gaining insight into their management style.
- Renewing their commitment to team and service improvement
A participant review:
"The opportunity to practice coaching techniques and the GROW model was invaluable. You cannot get a sense of how powerful coaching can be until you actually take part in it! Peers in the group all had situations which could occur in anyone's role as a manager and therefore all situations were learning opportunities."
To contact me about group coaching drop me an email:
Team Development
The intervention I offer for teams is developed in relation to what is happening in the team and what the leader and members of the team feel is necessary. Ultimately this is about making sure that the team know what they are supposed to achieve and have the working relationships and practices that will enable them to reach their goal. I have worked with teams in different ways including:
- Setting or refreshing team goals – supporting the team to agree targets or objectives.
- Reviewing a piece of work to celebrate success and learn lessons - helping the team to tackle similar work quicker/ better next time.
- Improving the team relationships – supporting the team to identify and value difference and find constructive ways to work together.
- Facilitating a change for the team e.g. a new team manager or members joining / changes in the work.
I believe that teams need regular time to refresh and reconnect with each other in order to maintain working relationships and prepare for future challenges.
If you would like to discuss what I might be able to offer your team please get in touch:
