When you get to know me, you will realise that I prefer to work behind the scenes. However, I also realise that the first step to working together is for you to have confidence in the relevance of my experience. Hence, these notes…
Having received my PhD in behavioural science, from the University of Bristol, I spent 15yrs working in mainstream management consultancy specialising in organisation development – primarily focused on corporate “Excellence” and creating exceptional places to work. After ten years or so, I began to see that I achieved my best results when working one-to-one with members of the leadership team.
Struggling to understand one particular Director, I decided to enhance my counselling skills. Training as a psychotherapist, takes six years, but that time seemed to pass remarkably quickly. One downside of it, is that the training almost precludes a full-time job, so I began to explore other roles. I was delighted to be offered the chance to help run part-time, what was then, one of the largest firms of consulting psychologists based in London. This allowed me to complete my training and largely to shift from group to individual interventions.
This organisation had three divisions, one of which involved executives in transition between roles and companies. As a result of my experience and training, I began to develop my practice with this group of people, getting to understand most aspects of the executive job search and recruitment processes, as well as supporting individuals in key roles – something that has been called ‘coaching’ of late.
There followed an 18 month secondment to one of the world’s largest firms of specialist caterers, where I was Group HR Director, working behind the scenes supporting the chief executive and core team of directors as they led the business through some remarkable political events. My remit meant that I was ultimately responsible for 54000 people, but two excellent HRMs dealt with almost all of this, leaving me to focus on the core team and very senior executive recruitment. This gave me insights into the other side of careers and top jobs.
About ten years ago, I decided to focus on delivery rather than managing enterprises and began to grow my one-to-one leadership development practice. My client base is largely very successful leaders in a wide range of different types of organisation and ‘industry’ but the thing that unites them is that they are all ‘people of power’, and my job is to help them achieve even more than they have already.
Recently, I decided to stream this into two types of work – support as a confidant to people in roles already, and helping those who are in transition to find their next greater step.
Along the way, I have authored 8 books, was awarded a Churchill Fellowship in Industry and Education, and regularly travel internationally giving keynote presentations, chairing conferences, and compering events, on various aspects of leadership, emotional and spiritual intelligence (EQ and SQ), governance, climate adaptation, corporate responsibility, futures, and strategy.
I write many articles and short essays, am on the editorial panel of one business journal, and judge some of the awards of the World Council for Corporate Governance.
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