Improve your personal skills-set ……. Perform better in your job …… Build your future career
In today’s challenging world, achieving job and career success is not easy. But using a friendly and supportive coach, who can provide guidance and perspective, can work wonders.
1:1 mentoring and coaching. Based on actual, real-world management experience!
We specialise in coaching for vital, core thinking and ‘soft’ skills, strategic skills and support to managers facing specific strategic or leadership challenges. We also offer 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 and ‘soft’ personal skills
Doing well in any role today needs you to be able to think effectively and have a range of vital cognitive and other ‘soft’ personal skills. We offer tailored, flexible coaching on both fronts:
Thinking clearly …… including: what’s involved in thinking well (e.g. defining the goal or problem carefully and following a structured process); dealing with cognitive biases; vital ‘hard’ thinking modes (e.g. analytical and critical thinking); vital ‘soft’ thinking modes (e.g. foresight, creativity and empathy); and judgment, decision-making and problem-solving skills.
Vital soft skills …….. Mindset: e.g. a learning/growth mindset, open-minded, positive outlook; Self-management: e.g. self-awareness, control over thoughts/emotions, attention/focus; Relational skills: e.g. emotional intelligence, listening, empathy, collaboration, influencing. Resilience skills: e.g: self-confidence, adaptability, learning, change-handling, determination; and Performance skills: e.g: motivation, drive, goal-setting, time/energy-management, self-care.
Coaching in strategic skills
To stand-out and progress, managers today need to be good strategic, not just operational, operators. But being strategic is more than just thinking long-term and writing company strategies and plans: its approach is useful to every manager in their day-to-day decision-making and how they do their job.
Our tailored, strategic coaching includes ……… what ‘being strategic’ means; reading and assessing situations systematically; developing options and making choices/decisions; applying different thinking modes; executing and managing strategy delivery; influencing/leading others strategically; adapting to change; and looking and acting as a strategic leader in your daily job.
Being strategic needs a mix of different cognitive skills, a supportive mindset and supportive habits and behaviours. It’s a powerful, overall skillset that we can help you develop.
‘Partner’ coaching to assist with decision-making and performance challenges
Mike offers tailored, confidential 1:1 support for leaders and managers who could use a neutral, supportive ‘external friend’ to share, discuss and help resolve or handle ‘particular ‘live’ strategic or leadership challenges and projects 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.
Challenges could range from the complex and substantial- like developing a new strategic plan or planning an organisational change programme – to more specific tasks like shaping a revised job description for a senior role.
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’ and defining a guiding North Star (or ‘self-vision’) for your future. This is about really knowing yourself and what you want in your life and career. Key aspects include knowing your personality, key values/beliefs, your passions/interests, main aptitudes/strengths, what gives you meaning/purpose in life and what your key future aspirations/hopes are for the future .
We’ll 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 for the future. We can also provide support with practical things like CV enhancement and preparing for interviews.
Examples of roles for which we can particularly help you prepare and find opportunities include: first-time manager; senior manager/director; trustee/non-exec director; charity/non-profit CEO; charity/non-profit Chair; mid-career pivot; and late-career/pre-retirement part-time roles.
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.
All our coaching follows the professional code of the European Coaching & Mentoring Council.
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 how he could assist.
Phone us on 01994 278118 or fill in the Contact page on this website.