Learning & Development

We believe that providing learning interventions that increase self awareness is the key to successful development. If, as individuals, we are more aware of who we are, what we believe, how we behave and how this impacts and influences others then we have greater opportunity to grow and change.

We have a wealth of experience of designing, developing and delivering a range of learning and development interventions across a variety of subjects. Our core areas of focus are:

Leadership & Management

Our Leadership and Management development programmes are designed to improve performance through a collection of flexible interventions and each programme is customised to meet the essential needs of your organisation. We can work with leaders individually, or implement programmes that embed the leadership culture across the organisation.

Working with & Influencing Others

For many organisations your most valuable assets are your people. How individuals work together is critical to an organisation’s performance and ultimate success. Our interventions in this area deliver sustainable improvements in relationships at work. This can be working with an individual, with 2/3 people or with groups or teams. We build understanding and awareness, address conflict, and improve collaboration. This approach generates trust, respect and ultimately enables people to develop effective working relationships and positively influence one another.

Personal Discovery & Development

Everything we do is a choice; what we chose to wear, what we eat and more significantly what we do. If we are inspired to do so we can chose to learn, change and develop. Our interventions in this area are an effective and powerful way of raising self awareness in order to facilitate learning and development. We often use feedback from managers, peers and direct reports as well as personality type indicators such as MBTI and Firo-B to support this process. If appropriate we can design and develop 360° feedback processes and reports that are tailored to your needs, for example mapped to your Organisation’s values, behaviours and culture. This data is collated, analysed and shared with the individuals as means of increasing self awareness and from a position of improved understanding defining a personal development plan.

Coaching

Coaching is a highly effective means of developing people. Whilst using external coaches is often seen as the preferred option in reality many organisations utilise a blend of external an internal coaching. Coaching can range from informal ‘on-the-job’ coaching, through to formal coaching relationships. The later requires people have been appropriately trained to fulfil the role of internal coach, a specific role. This allows organisations to provide a formal internal coaching programme where the coaching takes place at agreed sessions over a number of months. We have experience of delivering a range of programmes to develop coaching capability within an organisation.

Teamwork

Team is an often overused word in organisations and a group of individuals is habitually referred to as a team purely because they report to the same person. Creating a high performance team requires a great deal more than just a name and reporting structure and our work in this area is focussed on working with the team leader and their team over a period of time to ensure they can fully leverage the benefits of working as a cohesive and effective team.

In developing teams we work closely with the manager responsible for the team, the team leader, the other team members (individually) and then the whole team. Initially this forms part of the diagnostic phase and enables us to understand the people in the team, how the team is functioning and performing, and the areas that require attention. This often requires focus on some or all of the following areas:

Purpose - Is the team’s purpose clearly defined and explicitly communicated? Do all the team members fully understand the team’s purpose? Does the purpose serve to unify the team’s efforts and work? Does the purpose challenge and stretch the team? Where is it taking the team?
Relationships - Do the individual team members understand and appreciate who they are, their behaviours and their impact on others? What are the strengths of the relationships within the team? How well do the team members know each other? How much do they care?
Processes - How does the team function and work? What are the informal and formal processes the team operates by? How does the team function? Is conflict effectively managed or is it caustically eating away at the team?
Values and Operating Principles - Does the team have a set of guiding values and principles? Are they explicitly stated, understood and does everyone in the team live by them?
Performance ethic - Are the individuals and the team as a whole committed to high performance? Do individuals focus on individual performance? Independence and competition or do they collaborate and work interdependently to achieve greater overall performance?

We work with teams from across the organisation from executive teams to newly formed project teams; no one team is the same as another. To this end we structure our approach into three phases - Diagnostic, Development, Evaluation.

Customer Service

In a highly competitive world what gives you the edge? What sets you apart from your competitors? Customer service is not a process nor is it just a set of skills; exceptional customer service comes from having the right attitude. Creating a culture where customer service is truly understood and valued is critical. Individuals throughout the organisation need to have a desire to provide great customer service. Drawing on numerous years of customer service experience we design and deliver bespoke interventions that are focussed on generating the intrinsic motivation to deliver excellent customer service.

Find out more

For further information or to discuss your individual learning and development requirements with a member of our team, please call 01484 847 346 or contact us.

Learning & Development