COACHING

Our people, partners and associates, who all bring at least twenty years of commercial or professional experience, are all trained to International Coaching Federation standards and are all NLP Master Practitioners.

At the base of our approach lie two fundamentals. Firstly is the acceptance that our coaching clients are the experts on themselves, and have the resources to move forward to where they wish to be - that their agenda is paramount, and we hold that agenda and work to it. The second fundamental belief is that elicited solutions are more powerful than answers given. We seek to coach the solution from the client so it's achievable, appropriate, and they own it.

Highly ethical and working within our own values, we respect and work with the values and needs of our clients. Our executive coaching is content free as far as possible, but with the working alliance of a coach and client, a working relationship they form with its own protocols and parameters, there is scope to include skills or content coaching if requested and needed.

We routinely suggest a start-up meeting with the client's manager to agree the objectives of the coaching, and that then forms the agenda. It's very difficult to get meaningful behaviour change in short periods, so our suggested coaching contract is for twelve hours of coaching over six months. That can be extended, and sometimes condensed, but because so much of the clients 'absorption', getting the change in the muscle takes place between coaching sessions, the space between the sessions is important.

[back to top]

COACHING TRAINING

Coaching, that is eliciting solutions and strategies for moving that person forward, is fast becoming seen as a skill that line managers should have, and in April 2002 we designed a two-day 'Coaching for Managers' course for our corporate clients.

Indeed, modern coaching can be applied as a management style, a soft, easy but immensely powerful alternative to old-fashioned carrot and stick. It does this by leaving ownership of the solutions and the results with the person. It complements and makes real 'empowerment' and leverages, and brings new emotional intelligence skills to modern managers, increasingly seen as essential to real leadership. The course, customised each time and run for clients on request, is very pragmatic with lots of exercises and practice time and has very good reviews.

[back to top]

TEAM COACHING

Team coaching uses the same skills to coach a team towards its goal. Partly pure Socratic questioning, partly NLP and partly expert facilitation skills, a raising the bar coach can help a team - even one that isn't yet functioning like a team - define it's desired outcome, and work towards it, staying focused and productive.

[back to top]

SALES TRAINING

Consultancy and Design
Each training intervention is design specifically for the individual client based around their specific needs, criteria and outcomes. We pride ourselves upon being authentic and relevant. Consultancy and design projects can involve working with our client to design a whole sales training strategy and it can involve working at a very detailed level designing the content of an individual course. Because every course we deliver has a high behavioural content we make use of learning exercises and role plays written to reflect the client’s precise sales situations, often using a trainer and a coach to increase the feedback given to each individual.

Prospecting and Acquisition
This, we believe, is the first prospecting course designed to help people open a relationship with a new prospect rather than trying to sell them a product or force a meeting upon them. It is designed primarily for people who do not view sales as their first career, usually highly qualified professionals who now find themselves having to develop the business as well. We, of course, cover direct or cold calling but the programme also explores other sources of prospecting leads and the behaviours that best pull the prospective client towards you and your offering.

Advanced Relationship Selling
We have developed what we believe is the first sales skills course that effectively tackles not only the sales process, but also the behavioural elements required to make best use of the skills. This is our core programme, an implication sales programme that is designed to give professional services people and others, the knowledge and skills and then overlay the human behavioural elements to make them effective generators of new revenue.

[back to top]

BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT

Relationships and Networking
The ability to form fast productive relationships and powerful networks is seen as essential in today's business world. This two day course uses powerful NLP tools and knowledge to develop fast rapport building skills, expands the participants understanding of the drivers of human behaviour, and looks at the latest thinking in networking, covering the do's and don'ts and the top tips of great networkers.

Account Relationship Management
Many professional organisations have recognised the need for relationship management in their largest client accounts. However this is not an easy role. The relationship manager frequently finds themselves in the heart of the battle between the client’s desire for a relationship of trust and their organisation’s need to introduce more services and offerings. This programme is for those relationship managers and seeks to help them identify the key buyers in the account; quickly build relationships of trust and to uncover the client’s real agenda.

Sales Facilitation Skills
Ask any of your clients or prospects what kind of relationship they want with their service providers and they will tell you that they are looking for a partner, someone to work with them to help develop solutions to their needs. Most organisations, having heard this, then turn up with their next great idea on a fifty slide presentation, tell the client what it is they need, and then wonder why they didn’t get the business. Sales Facilitation offers a real and practical alternative to this by developing the skills and behaviours a sales professional needs to help two teams reach consensus on a solution and a way forward. A key skill for Account Relationship Mangers, this programme is also available to teams working on a live opportunity.

In addition we have programmes that build skills and success in

Sales Management Training
Again, originally designed for professional services firms, this programme gives participants the tools, skills, and processes required to manage the sales efforts of others who report to them for the sales part of their role. Finely focused, it shows participants, all very busy people, who are sales managing as just a part of their role, how to 'soft' manage each direct report in one hour per month.

Our programmes are all modular, and we can select components of content and then customise to bring very specific resources to client. We can build emotional intelligence in the leaders of tomorrow, tackle limiting beliefs in individuals or groups, unpack and change unhelpful attitudes, positively change behaviours in people - and work in many other areas where some belief, attitude or behaviour is not helping an individual or group achieve all they might.

All our coaches and trainers, outstanding behaviourists, are senior people who bring years of practical experience to their work. They have been there, done it, know the realities of the corporate world, banking, professional partnerships, and what excellent performance in a modern business setting requires.

Our courses, normally of two days duration, are all heavily customised for clients making learning and behaviour change more specific. Please contact us for more details and course descriptors. Once a course is re-written for a client, we charge only trainer day rates.

[back to top]

Leadership

Leadership is the single most important issue for many Human Resources teams as we move into the third millennium. Many management development people looking at providing a pool of candidates for executive level succession planning are struggling and the common area of low competencies has been around the 'soft' skills of leaders. Variously seen as interpersonal skills, communication skills and influencing skills, these are all components of emotional intelligence, the core of leadership, but for the last sixty years, organisations have largely ignored these in favour of 'management' skills, numeracy, being able to manage numbers and control the bottom line.

But why were some people much more effective leaders than others? These people could communicate their vision, motivate others and inspire them to achieve beyond what was thought possible. They could genuinely 'lead' others.

So what makes them better leaders?

Research is showing that these people, as well as being bright, all have high emotional intelligence, and jobs and roles in organisation can have the emotional intelligence required identified as competencies.

raising the bar coaches can develop emotional intelligence in people; develop them so they are ready for senior leadership roles, rather than just senior management.

[back to top]

Emotional Intelligence

Why is it that we are so short of leaders today? Real leaders? We have any number of effective managers, but many organisations are struggling to find real leaders for their succession planning and many experts believe this is due to a lack of emotional intelligence. For years it was thought that a high IQ was enough, but increasingly research is showing that people with additionally high 'EQ' are better managers and leaders than people with low emotional intelligence.

EI, as it is called, is, very simply, the ability to understand ones emotions and control your behaviour accordingly, understand the emotional state of others and influence or control their behaviour.

This ability is the very core of leadership - and it's this ability that many up and coming and already senior people in the corporate world lack. The good news it that unlike IQ, which is pretty much fixed by twenty years of age, EQ can be measured and developed very specifically for many job and leadership roles.

We use Bar-On EQI testing and then develop individuals by coaching them against specific competencies required for the role.

For more on this, contact us and Mike or Nick will talk you through the appropriateness of building EI for specific applications.

[back to top]