Elevate your key thinking skills ……. Perform better in your job …….. Create a clearer path for your future success……
In today’s challenging world, achieving job success and a fulfilling life is not easy. But using a friendly and supportive coach, who can provide practical guidance, support and perspective, can work wonders.
We help achievement-minded people – from career starters to experienced managers – to achieve the results, satisfaction and personal growth they want from their work lives.
1:1 mentoring and coaching. Based on actual, real-world management experience!
We specialise in coaching for vital thinking and strategic skills, vital ‘soft’ personal skills/behaviours, and support for handling and resolving ‘live’ management challenges or problems. We also provide mentoring support for strategic career planning and preparing for new career roles.
Our senior partner, Mike Owen, is able to apply his 25+ years’ broad management experience as well as two management degrees and two decades of in-house and external coaching.
Coaching for vital thinking skills
Every idea, intention or action first starts with thought. But, sadly, most managers are not trained in how to think clearly and effectively, preferring often simply to rely on gut feeling or past experience. We want to help change that! Mike offers coaching around the following areas:
- What effective thinking means and involves.
- Dealing with cognitive biases & distortions
- Vital ‘hard’ thinking skills e.g. analytical/systems thinking and critical thinking
- Vital ‘soft’ skills e.g. foresight, creative thinking, empathy/perspective-taking
- Judgment, decision-making and problem-solving
- Other thinking modes/skills e.g. self-reflecting, effective thinking in a group, ethical thinking
- Personal qualities, habits and skills to help with sound thinking
Coaching for vital strategic skills
To stand-out and progress, managers today need to be good strategic thinkers, not just just have good operational skills. Being strategic starts with knowing and relating to your organisation’s wider business strategies and issues. It means being able to look at issues roundly and fully, see the ‘bigger picture’ and to come up with ideas and solutions for the future. And it means being able to draft actual strategies and plans to respond to situations.
Strategic thinking needs a combination of thinking skills and related personal qualities. It’s a powerful, overall skillset that we can help you master.
Coaching for other vital professional skills & behaviours
Doing well in any role today also needs a range of core ‘soft” personal skills and qualities. We provide individualised, tailored coaching around the following types of attributes:
- Mindset: e.g: a learning/growth mindset, positive outlook, open-minded, curiosity
- Self-management: e.g: self-awareness, control over thoughts/emotions, focus
- Relational skills: e.g: emotional intelligence, listening, empathy, collaboration, .
- Team leadership: e.g: team-structuring, goal-setting, motivation, coaching
- Communication: e.g: influencing, persuading, facilitating meetings
- Confidence & adaptability: e.g: drive, will-power, resilience, learning, change-handling
‘Partner’ coaching to assist with challenging management decisions and situations
Mike offers tailored, confidential 1:1 conversations with managers who could use a neutral, supportive ‘external friend’ to share, discuss and help resolve or handle ‘particular ‘live’ issues or problems in their job. He’ll help you reflect and consider issues objectively and clearly, gently offering challenge and questions to help you see the bigger picture. So you can make the right decision and move forward with confidence.
Support with self-insight and career planning
Are you looking for more clarity, meaning or sense of purpose in your work life? Do you perhaps feel stuck or unfulfilled in your current job or career? Could you use some support in thinking about or preparing for your next move? These are just the types of issues we can assist with.
The foundation of our support is helping you to gain excellent ‘self-insight’. This is about really knowing yourself and what you want in your life and career. Key aspects include knowing your personality, strengths/weaknesses, key values/beliefs, main likes/dislikes, and key aspirations..
Then we work closely with you to help you think about and clarify your feelings and future aims; explore options and strategies; counter any fears or doubts; identify suitable new opportunities; and really boost your confidence, positivity and resilience for the future. We can also provide support with practical things like CV enhancement and preparing for interviews.
Examples of types of new role for which we can particularly help you prepare and find opportunities include: first-time manager; senior manager / director; trustee / non-executive director; charity or non-profit CEO; charity or non-profit Chair; mid-career pivot; and late-career/pre-retirement part-time role.
Our coaching approach and values
The overall aim with our coaching and mentoring is to help our clients elevate their levels of confidence, skill, effectiveness and fulfilment in what they do.
For all areas of our support, we’ll design and propose a tailored coaching/mentoring programme, with a set of clearly agreed set of goals/outcomes and progress measures from the start. A programme typically comprises a series of 60-90 minute sessions, either online or in-person, running over a number of weeks.
We use a flexible range of approaches and techniques, but often including for skill-based coaching, for example: discussion, self-reflection, mental models, solution exploration, guided practice and feedback. To optimise learning, we always seek, where possible, to link coaching to actual projects or live issues in a client’s daily job. And at the end of a programme, we’ll always help you to plan how best to embed and carry on improving newly learned skills.
FREE, initial ‘discovery’ consultation
What specific development goals or performance issues are on your mind ?
As a first step, we suggest a no-cost, totally confidential 1:1 chat with Mike. Either online or by phone. Tell him what’s on your mind and discover some ideas/proposals about how he could assist.
Phone us on 01994 278118 or fill in the Contact page on this website.