Organisations getting ready for rapid growth or going through large-scale transformation often need additional support whether for defined periods of time or to achieve certain strategic needs.

As a senior level operator, I’m engaged by such organisations for the following:

• Leading visioning, strategy, prioritisation and goal setting.
• Running quarterly planning and aligning delivery across leadership and teams.
• Improving accountability and decision making.
• Driving continuous improvement of operations and new ways of working.
• Building a solid foundation of ways of working and operations upon which to scale.
• Leading high priority, strategic projects.
• Developing coherent, high performing leadership teams by collaborating with executives and senior. leadership.
• Creating engaged, collaborative, high performing teams and workplaces which are successful, responsive and healthy.
• Coaching and mentoring leaders and emerging leaders.
• Evolving and maintaining culture during periods of high growth.

As a fractional executive (for example, fractional Chief of Staff), I augment your team, providing strategic advice on your specific, current needs while also operating on the ground to bring these to life. Minimising risk and long-term commitment.

Typical models for working together I offer are:

Model 1: Part-Time, Flexible Engagement
Working with and in your leadership team on a part-time basis to meet certain goals and hyperfocus on solving them, bringing focus, clarity and a sense of urgency. Typically works well for small-mid sized organisations.

Model 2: Full Time, Fixed Engagement
Working with and in your leadership team on a full-time basis for a specific duration.
For when you need someone to come in, quickly execute while you find the right hire to join permanently, or for large, transforming organisations or organisations who need support through a specific period.

Creating a winning strategy that is clear and easily communicated, building shared understanding and alignment across teams, and executing on said strategy, is no mean feat.

So many organisations struggle to articulate where they are now and where they want to be headed.

This can lead to teams working on 'stuff' that doesn't make a difference for customers or your business. Are we measuring what really matters or are we stuck focussing on delivering output with a false sense of being productive? 

Are your teams overloaded with more work than they can handle because you're not really clear on what will make a difference and everything is a priority, meaning nothing is a priority?

Perhaps you don't know what progress you're making towards your vision and goals due to low visibility and transparency which also causes misalignment across the organisation and teams.

Is planning painful and ineffective because teams are unsure which direction they are heading or there's little space for innovation?

I work with you to:

• Gain clarity of where you are, where you're wanting to head and your winning strategies to get there.
• Create an operating rhythm for reviewing and adjusting your strategic planning, defining goals to bring your overall strategy to life (e.g. OKRs).
• Improve prioritisation and create flow.
• Provide holistic visibility and transparency of the work to be done and progress towards your strategy and vision, enabling teams to collaborate effectively.
• Connect your strategic planning to execution, including team planning and how teams are organised.

Get in touch to discuss your needs.

Leadership development can sometimes be a 'tick the box exercise', covering only one-dimensional aspects of leadership as opposed to delivering real, lasting personal and organisational improvements.

In today's complex, uncertain and volatile world, leaders are faced with new challenges to navigate. The recent pandemic, including a shift to remote-based working for many of the workforce is a prime example.

And so, the way in which we develop and support leaders must adapt to equip leaders with the skills and resilience to navigate today's world.

My approach to developing and supporting leaders focusses on:

• Development of the self.
  Improving self awareness, developing the ability to respond more appropriately to the team and organisation's needs. Taking self accountability for the leader's own development, wellbeing, energy and performance.
• Leading others.
  Understanding how to motivate, empower, support and lead diverse groups of people.
• Leading through complexity and change.
  Learning how to sense the environment the leader is in, its complexities, the interplay between behaviours, practices and mindset. Using this skill to then develop an appropriate response, adapting leadership style accordingly and identifying the most impactful levers to tweak to improve performance.

I work with you in a multitude of different ways:

• A sounding board to senior leadership on strategy, effectiveness and operations.
• 1:1 coaching and mentoring of leaders and emerging leaders.
• Group coaching and mentoring.
• Leadership development workshops and training.
• Bespoke mindfulness-based emotional intelligence programs, workshops and practices for elevated leadership performance and wellbeing.

Mindfulness and emotional intelligence fosters improved self awareness, focus and wellbeing, providing a competitive advantage for your organisation, leaders and teams in today's busy world of constant change.

In the workplace, we're often focused on the results we want to achieve and how to get there. Rarely is a workplace focused on the quality of 'being' of the individual who is doing the work.

• Are you and your teams struggling to maintain attention and focus?
• Are you often reacting rather than responding appropriately to the situation at hand?
• How often are you carrying baggage from the previous meeting into the next, instead of being present in the current meeting with a fresh mind?

Cognitive, emotional and social demands come at us all day long.

With these accelerated work environments and increased demands on our attention, we cannot hope for the world to slow down. We can instead look to increase our inner capacity, our emotional intelligence to cope better with the environment we are working in. 

Mindfulness training provides leaders and teams with practical methods for enhancing awareness and attention, non-judgementally, helping you adopt more productive and positive ways of acting and being. With awareness, you're able to choose how to respond. In turn, this can significantly enhance their potential for responding to change appropriately.

I weave mindfulness and emotional intelligence micro-practices into most aspects of my coaching.

In addition, I also offer standalone workshops, trainings and retreats specifically focussed on cultivating mindfulness and greater emotional intelligence. 

Examples of my standalone offerings are:

• Workshop: An Introduction to Mindfulness Based Emotional Intelligence.
• Workshop: Fostering Self Compassion for Greater Wellbeing.
• Workshop: Mindfulness and Managing Energy to support Performance and Wellbeing.
• 8 week course: Cultivating Mindfulness and Emotional Intelligence.
  An 8 week course to build emotional intelligence and mindfulness through meditation and mindfulness practices. Sessions cover a variety of topics including meditation, mindful communication, empathy, resilience and self awareness.

Scientific studies show that an 8-week mindfulness training course led to changes in participant’s brain areas associated with attention, learning and memory processes, emotion regulation, self-referential processing, and perspective taking.

All workshops and courses are interactive and experiential, focused on building skills you can apply in daily life.

As your organisation grows larger, the more difficult it can be to maintain culture, effective ways of working and operations.

Many organisations introduce additional, unneeded complexity when scaling, causing them to lose their agility and responsiveness to change.

Scaling out doesn't have to mean increasing levels of management coordination. Instead opt for networks of teams which are aligned and moving in the same direction.

In supporting you scale your business I partner with you to:

• Address key challenges so that you're able to grow rapidly, scale in size (geographically or otherwise) and grow revenue while increasing efficiency and effectiveness.
  
  Together we do this by:
  
  
• Reviewing your current ways of working, current rhythm, the way in which the organisation and teams are structured, identifying areas for improvement in and across teams and the organisation.
• Identifying the key opportunities to enable you to operationalise your business as you move from startup to scale up mode, creating a solid foundation upon which to build.

Get in touch to discuss support for your scaling and growth plans.

Nowadays tales of unhappy, burnt out people and teams are commonplace in our complex world that is undergoing frequent change, bringing with it disruption, pressure and uncertainty.

Unmanageable workloads, unreasonable time pressures, lack of control and feeling unmotivated, undervalued and unsupported are some of the underlying causes of this chronic workplace stress.

Add to this the pressures of scaling your organisation and teams as you prepare for growth, where you're trying to do it all and this stress can be amplified.

Perhaps your organisation is going through a large scale transformation where a switch has been flipped and people are left confused, stressed, not really knowing what they're doing or what is expected of them.

Or maybe there are some specific areas of improvement you know would make a difference, for example:

• Shifting to a culture more focussed on teamwork and collaboration than a hero culture.
• Bringing more experimentation and innovation into your team ways of working rather than just delivering 'stuff'.
• Taking teams which are doing pretty well, yet have room for improvement, from 'good' to 'great'.
• Increasing flow, promoting deeper agility to support improved delivery and team health.
• More sustainable, healthy working environments. Working smarter, rather than harder.
• Improving the quality of decision making and execution and team accountability.
• Optimising for hybrid or remote ways of working.

Your people are your greatest asset. Creating an environment where they can perform at their best simply makes good business sense.

I have a real passion for coaching teams of all shapes and sizes to perform at their best, be more engaged and do this in ways that support their health and wellbeing, not detract from it.
(Having said that, I'll always have a soft spot for coaching digital product and tech teams!).

I coach:

• Teams who are already doing well to go from 'good to great'.
• Unhappy, stressed teams who are struggling to perform.
• Teams in scaling organisations needing to establish strong foundations.
• Teams undergoing large-scale transformation.
• Multiple teams in one environment/department/organisation.

My coaching focuses on:

• Understanding the unique context of the team(s) in question, what's getting in their way.
• Working together to remove blocks and realise opportunities for improvements.
• Equipping teams with the knowledge on how to improve, whilst leading them through the experience of what good looks and feels like in practice, to solidify the learning and change. 

Get in touch today to discuss your teams and specific needs.

Being clear on what it will take to win is one big part of the puzzle. Taking action and creating momentum and flow to validate and deliver on your winning strategy is equally as important.

Are your teams at breaking point? Struggling with unsustainable workloads with way too many demands on their time than they're able to provide?

Competing priorities? i.e. everything is important so you have no priorities.

Is delivery sluggish and planning painful as you struggle with handoffs, misalignment across teams and lots of dependencies?

Perhaps your ways of working haven't adapted to suit hybrid and remote ways of working, trying to work the way that you always have in this new world.

Ineffective ways of working create waste and feel like you're wading through treacle, making it difficult to get traction and flow, are exhausting for your people and over time causes burnout which hurts them, your customers and ultimately your bottom line.

Let's remove the interferences and allow your people and teams potential to be realised.

I partner with you to:

• Eliminate waste and create flow through co-creating improved ways of working, enabling teams to be successful, responsive and healthy, delivering customer and business outcomes instead of just churning out 'stuff' that we're unsure is making a difference.
• Shift mindset and ways of working to focus on experimentation, innovation and continuous learning in order to best meet customer and business needs, rather than focussing solely on execution.
• Foster organisational and team agility, to give and maintain a competitive advantage through remaining responsive to change and able to change direction when needed in these uncertain times.
• Create a solid foundation of ways of working upon which to continuously improve and incrementally change without the need to continually go through large-scale transformations.
• Organise optimally, minimising dependencies and handoffs as much as is feasible in your context through evolving your organisation and team design.
• Optimise ways of working for remote and hybrid ways of working.

Working together, we leverage principles and practices from agile, lean, lean startup, systems thinking and human centred design that suit your specific context. No cookie cutter approach here.

Workshops, training, team days and retreats are often an integral part of delivering on an engagement for clients.
There may also be times when you might have a need for facilitation or training on a one off or occasional basis and this is where I come in.

Workshop and training can be tailored to your unique needs or perhaps one of the current offerings below already meets what you're looking for.

Examples of some workshops and training I offer are:

Workshops / Offsites

• Strategic Planning.
• Quarterly Planning.
• Team Days/Offsites.
• Leadership Offsites.
  For example, monthly leadership offsites focussed on developing your leadership team as a whole unit (e.g. where/how to improve, deep dives into strategy, team dynamics, wellbeing and performance). Can be accompanied by 1:1 coaching.
• Tailored Retrospectives.

Private Training

• Fundamentals of Design Thinking.
• Effective, high performing teams.
• Agile and Lean 101.
• Systems Thinking.
• Cultivating Mindfulness Based Emotional Intelligence.
  An 8 week program for small cohorts, standalone workshops on kindness and self compassion, mindfulness for presence and performance.

All workshops can be run virtually or in-person.
Get in touch to discuss your unique needs.