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Before we start, a quick acknowledgement:  However bullish I may be about my own value, I couldn't do what I do without the help and support of colleagues, many of whom were partners in the stories you see below.  For their professionalism and experience, I am always grateful.

A senior manager in one of the UK’s biggest organisations had been passed over for promotion and the process had been handled insensitively by her manager (and as a result she only found out by accident that someone else had been offered the job she thought was hers).  She felt completely stuck: she saw her career as a passive process in which the organisation would decide what happened to her.

I met her as part of a wider programme during which we only had one hour together for one-to-one coaching.  During that hour, I focused her on prioritising her own strengths, and itemising the qualities that represented the ‘dream job’ she really wanted.  We then talked through how she might negotiate from a position of strength to make some changes in her current role so that the need for promotion disappeared.  I was working in partnership with a professional role player, and we took the opportunity to role play her next encounter with her manager, simply so she could practise coping with her own emotional reaction.  She ended the hour a different person, feeling powerful, confident and clear about what she really wanted.

A global confectionery manufacturer wanted to run a programme to help managers make stronger links between what their departments did and the financial/business impact of their actions. They were stuck on how to use offsite training in a way that would emotionally engage participants.

The 'obvious' route was to use some kind of simulation, but a theoretical, computer-driven simulation was unlikely to achieve this. I designed a behaviour-based simulation in which participants worked for one of two competing confectionery companies.  Everything the companies did was done for real: they had to manufacture real confectionery from supplies of raw materials (working on primus stoves in sheds) and influence clients (role players) with high quality standards to buy them at a price which returned a reasonable profit. ‘Time out’ sessions allowed them to apply financial and business improvement measures to their enterprises.

Not only did managers find they were better able to articulate the links between front line work and business impact, but many of them discovered more compassion for their manufacturing employees after two days standing over a hot stove, stirring!
 

Area managers in a large retail bank were stuck with a dilemma: they and their teams were expected to be continually developing new innovative ideas for gaining and retaining customers, and for solving problems, but at the same time the highly regulated banking environment created a culture of risk aversion.

I ran a series of two-day workshops for the area managers, many of whom saw themselves as uncreative and were frightened of bringing ‘weird’ techniques to their team. (As one participant told me on the first day: “I’ve worked in banking for 25 years.  The words ‘creative’ and ‘thinking’ have no meaning for me.”)  I introduced them to a number of highly structured, pragmatic creative thinking tools, all of which were suited for use in a team.  While they were with me on the workshop, they all tested the techniques against real-life problems and situations they faced.  They were surprised and relieved to discover just how ‘routine’ being creative can be.  Within a couple of months, team members were reporting more inclusive meetings, and greater efficiency in terms of the rate of problem solving and idea generation.

The operations division of a global financial services firm could not get newly promoted managers to 'let go'.  The firm had a highly team-oriented culture; this meant that a team member might suddenly find him/herself managing the very same people with whom s/he had been working closely for months or even years.  Instead of facing up to the difficult transition from 'colleague' to 'manager', the new managers were avoiding confronting performance problems and found delegation difficult.

Rather than deliver a 'traditional' skills workshop, I built a 2-day programme around experiential sessions based on participants' real life challenges, which also gave an opportunity for participants to work with personality and other personal change frameworks to give a psychological context to the transition they were experiencing.  Having worked with professional role players to try out putting management theory into practice, participants ended the workshop feeling they had already mastered many of the key approaches they needed in their roles.