Clients: examples

These are some of the examples of clients I've worked with, in both a coaching and consultancy capacity.

First 100 days coaching:

I worked with a client who was new to a large and complex organisation, and charged with heading the organisational design and change programme for a major new initiative.  We worked on increasing the client's visibility and influence in the organisation, aligning the client's business goals to their inner sense of purpose and achievement, and finding effective ways of building a new team to work collaboratively.

First 100 days coaching:

My client was newly-promoted to a senior manager role in a loosely-structured team of creative individuals.  We worked with establishing the client's leadership style, increasing their effectiveness in communication – both listening and giving direction and feedback, and promoting a new sense of pride and achievement in the whole team.

Executive coaching:

I worked with a client who was a very successful young executive in a large organisation.  The client wanted to work on achieving a better life/work balance, finding their own leadership style (while leading staff who were often older and more experienced) and maintaining the productivity of the team while enabling new and creative solutions to emerge.

Executive coaching:

The client initially wanted coaching in public speaking and addressing large board meetings.  After the first couple of sessions, we broadened the scope to include fine-tuning own leadership and communication style, communicating with diverse stakeholders, and influencing senior board members in new and more creative ways.

Coaching for promotion:

My client had recently unsuccessfully applied for a senior job and – as agreed with their manager – embarked on coaching to prepare them for the next senior opportunity.  We worked on increasing the client's confidence, finding a better work/life balance, influencing without authority and honing leadership skills while still not in a position of leadership.  The client was soon promoted into another senior position.

Multi-functional geographically-dispersed team:

I was approached to help the manager of a large team of strong individuals with a bad track record in collaboration.  The manager was newly-promoted within the team, and had strong working relationships with individuals but doubted their own leadership ability.  We worked on designing a team away-day, in preparation for which I collated anonymised expectations from the whole team, and aligned them to the manager's business objectives and implementation strategy.  During the process, I also coached the manager, both in handling their own leadership challenges, and in facilitating ongoing team communication.  The whole team agreed that the intervention has hugely improved the way they worked together, and left them with renewed faith in their leader.

Regional broadcasting team:

I was asked to run a series of individual and one group coaching session for a senior team with a new leader and a history of poor management choices in the previous leader.  I contracted for complete confidentiality during individual sessions, which enabled team members to deal with often emotionally painful consequences of previous leadership decisions.  We then explored as a group how the team could move forward and establish a relationship of trust and confidence in the new leader.  I was contacted by all the team members individually to say how therapeutic and useful they found the process.

Geographically-dispersed creative team:

I was approached by the manager of a large and creative team who wanted to implement new ways of working, including an office move and possible restructuring.  After collecting anonymised feedback from all the team members, the manager and I worked on designing a creative team-building day, which would help the team to get to know each other's strengths in a different environment and help them plan and prepare for the future.  We concluded with firm commitments from all team members – as well as the leader – as to what they would do differently.  From the feedback I got, the team are still following the newly-established shared rules of engagement.

Move to new building with new ways of working:

The head of the change programme for a building move – which had gone successfully – wanted to re-inspire and re-energize the people to continue working in new ways rather than finding workarounds and going back to old ways of thinking and behaving.  I designed and ran a series of facilitative workshops, which focused on both the emotional and human aspects of change, and ways of dealing with work-related stress and pressure.  As a result, communication, collaboration and creativity improved in most of the teams working in the new building.

Major restructuring, with planned redundancies: 

I was approached by the HR Director of a large company who wanted to 'do something' to help a team of senior managers tasked with implementing a quick and painful change process.  All the managers were professional experts with not much experience of leadership development or change management.  We agreed that an off-the-shelf change or leadership workshop was not appropriate, so I joined them in their team meetings, during which they were planning for and preparing the change.  By quickly establishing trust and confidence, I was able to offer impromptu nuggets of change management theory, while facilitating the discussion as to how they could apply it in their own situation.  All the participants said that it was the best – and most timely – training and development they'd ever received.