We’ve been working with clients for over 12 years.

We’ve no idea where that time has gone! We’ve travelled the world and had the privilege to work in some wonderful places with amazing people. We have run hundreds of courses, facilitated huge numbers of meetings, had many, many coaching sessions, and met thousands of people. And we’ve focussed on developing people so they can grow themselves, their teams, and of course, the company’s productivity and ultimately… bottom line.

We’ve been early-morning swimming in Barton Springs in Austin, Texas, with our team before a full day of leadership training, eaten extraordinary things with our students in Asia, been zip-wiring and Go-Aping with our graduate programme, been camping in castles in our team building sessions, and shared other experiences, panoramic views and the odd glass of wine with our clients.

Below are just a small number of thumbnail case studies. Please get in touch for more in-depth studies or to arrange to talk to some of our clients as our references.

Barton Springs, Austin, Texas

Barton Springs, Austin, Texas

Oiling the communication cogs of the matrix

Four  distinct locations, three separated by water and all part of a matrix managed organisation. Lots of emails and email trails. Trust was pretty low. Performance needed to improve. We brought all the leaders and managers together for a leadership programme over a period of months. We focused on communication, coaching as a leadership style, how to build high-performing teams and influencing skills. We also used a powerful relationship awareness tool which we wove throughout each module.

The result? Massively improved self awareness – huge improvement in awareness and preferences of others and drastically improved communication. Oh yes… and performance went up too. As a result of this programme we were asked to roll this out to direct reports down the company three more times.

The team leaders and area managers wanted to deliver our actor-based customer experience training for their contact centre staff. Morale and performance had been dropping. It was really important for them that their people saw them totally immersed in the new training and willing to ‘have a go’ themselves. We helped them do more than that. We designed a programme around their new Customer Experience behaviours.

With focused ‘train the trainer’ sessions and some lessons in basic acting, the team did brilliantly, supported by their own L&D team who also took our training. They delivered the programme countrywide and the response they got from team members was an overwhelming thumbs up. Morale and performance up. Oscars anyone?

Our client wanted to support colleagues across the whole organisation. There were lots of instances of people having “mini problems” that didn’t warrant a full day’s training course but that were causing issues which, if not resolved quickly, were creating bigger HR problems. Many of the issues were around relating to others and difficult conversations.

We put our heads together and came up with The Coaching Surgery. Our coaches spent “a day in a room” at different sites across the company every month. And anyone across the organisation – from call centre team leaders to senior managers – could book three sessions with us. Sessions were 1 hour 20 mins and so we saw up to 5 people a day. It was a huge success and a great boost to morale. Many comments we got as feedback were about how useful it was and that people had solved issues quickly and simply themselves through coaching. We loved our surgeries and they were also a hugely economic way of delivering quality coaching to the organisation.

Our client wanted to help its teams to become healthcare partners to their customers. Rather than “telling” them what to do, they wanted to create a real, lifelong partner relationship. We worked with our client to develop coaching training, using actors to bring behaviours to life, to support colleagues change their approach and adopt a coaching style. We ran programmes both in the UK and Europe and were part of the cultural change programme which looked at changing the way business was carried out.

One of our lovely actor trainers is now so well known in Norway and Germany he is almost asked to sign autographs when he goes to run training courses! We were asked to create a series of videos firstly for performance management training. We used the character of “Pete”. A well-meaning manager whose heart is definitely in the right place but who was in need of some people skills. Our videos combined a serious training message with appropriate levels of humour. Pete was very successful and our client then asked us to create videos to support a leadership programme – with Pete as the star. An “Everyman” for managers to relate to, along with his line manager, the highly-accomplished coach and mentor, Anna.