Business and Team Coaching in Milton Keynes

What This Is Usually About

A manager who was promoted because they were good at the job, and is now responsible for people, which is a different job nobody trained them for.

A team that was fine and now is not. The same two people disagreeing in every meeting. Decisions taken and then quietly not acted on. A deadline approaching and everyone getting sharper with each other in a way that will be denied afterwards.

Or the owner, who has run out of people to think out loud with. That one comes up more than anything else, and it is not a soft problem. Nobody in the business can be told everything, and the people outside it do not know enough to be useful.

Underneath most of these is the same thing: something is not being said. Not out of dishonesty, usually out of habit. My job is to make it sayable, and then to help you do something with it.

What the Evidence Says, and This Is the Page Where It Applies

Coaching has a weaker research base than counselling does, and I would rather say that than dress it up. The best available summary is a 2014 meta-analysis by Theeboom, Beersma and van Vianen, which looked at coaching inside organisations and found positive effects across all five outcome categories it examined, ranging from g = 0.43 for coping to g = 0.74 for goal-directed self-regulation.

Two things worth knowing about that. The first is the authors' own summary, which is more honest than anything I could write: coaching is very popular as a management tool, and research on its effectiveness is lagging behind. They add that the studies vary widely in method and mostly lack a firm theoretical basis.

The second is that this evidence is specifically about coaching in an organisational context. On my personal development coaching page I have to say that the research does not straightforwardly transfer to someone sorting out their own life. Here it does. This is the setting the study actually measured.

What the Work Covers

Shaped around what the business is dealing with rather than run off a syllabus, so treat this as the shape of a conversation.

For managers and leaders. Leadership, motivating people who are not motivated by what motivates you, holding a difficult conversation without it becoming a formal process, and performance when the pressure is real.

For teams. Communication, how decisions actually get made as opposed to how the org chart says they do, managing pressure, and the specific problem of a team that has stopped disagreeing out loud.

For owners and directors. Confidence, direction, and having somewhere to think that is not the pub and not your spouse.

If the person who needs this is one senior individual rather than a team, that is executive coaching, which is its own thing. If what you actually want is a wellbeing or mental health session for staff, that is corporate wellbeing workshops.

Coaching, Consultancy and Training Are Not the Same Thing

Worth being clear, because the words get used interchangeably and they buy you different things.

A consultant studies your business and tells you what to do. A trainer teaches a defined skill to a group. A coach works with the people who already have the information and helps them use it, decide with it, and act on it.

So if what you need is someone to redesign your sales process, I am the wrong purchase and I will say so on the first call. If your sales process is fine and the team is not doing it, that is my end of the problem.

Why a Counsellor Doing This Is Not as Odd as It Sounds

I spent more than twenty years in corporate leadership before I retrained, and over fifteen years as an international sports coach with individuals and teams competing at European and World Championship level. Neither of those is decoration on a therapy CV. They are where the pattern recognition comes from.

What the counselling training added is the part most business coaching lacks. When a manager cannot have a conversation with someone, there is usually a reason that has very little to do with the manager's communication skills. Being trained to notice that, and to work with it rather than around it, is the difference between a session that feels good and one that changes something on Monday.

It also means I can tell the difference between a work problem and a person who is struggling. Those need different things, and mistaking one for the other wastes everybody's time.

Where and How

On site at your premises, which is usually best for team work, or in person in Wolverton, within easy reach of Stony Stratford, Newport Pagnell, Bletchley and Woburn Sands. Online suits one to one coaching particularly well, and it means we are not limited to Milton Keynes.

Sessions run one to one, as a small group, or as a mix, which is the most common shape: individual sessions with the manager alongside occasional work with the whole team. Packages are arranged around what you need rather than sold as a fixed product.