We listen to and respond accurately to your need. Our core work is about helping leaders to deliver projects and change, encompassing a wide range of specific behavioural challenges.

Once the need is understood, we quickly co-create (with our customers) a solution to meet it.

Here are some examples:

• Project people skills
• High performing conversations
• From manger to leader
• Just enough process (PM traditional)
• The change leader
• Engaging stakeholders
• Making sponsorship work
• High performing relationships
• Teams that deliver
• The trusted deliverer

How we design and deliver

Our work concentrates on the human challenges of delivery and our leadership development is always experiential with professional actors bringing learning to life.  Our process work is straight forward, just enough to get the job done, and no badges.  Our best client programmes follow-up training workshops with sustaining mechanisms, including coaching and action sets, to make sure the learning stick. We help our customers to sustain their own learning and avoid becoming dependent on us.

If you look inside our development programmes, you are likely to see some of these ingredients:

• Influencing without formal authority
• Winning ownership and commitment
• Learning to coach
• Multi-company collaboration
• Making partnering work
• Giving effective feedback
• Collaborative problem solving
• Presenting with impact
• Difficult conversations
• Managing upwards
• Tackling conflict on projects
• Learning to trust and be trusted
• Building high performing relationships
• Building real cross-functional teams
• Team integration and co-location
• Culture for innovation
• Leading virtual teams
• Managing people performance on projects
• Projects across borders and cultures
• Working through unconscious bias
• Planning with the team
• Effective Steering Boards
• Making project meetings work
• Facilitating workshops
• Engaging stakeholders
• Understanding customer needs

Where you have a critical project which needs very careful attention to help get it set-up so that it can deliver or where your project manager is learning or stepping up to bigger challenges, and needs extra support.

• Team Mobilisation

Flexible coaching /consulting service against an agreed budget to help a difficult or complex project get the best possible start. Can include one-on-one work with the sponsor and/or project manager, facilitating key workshops, or reviewing key stage outcomes.

• Project Pit-Stops

A pit-stop is a quick targeted intervention for a busy sponsor or project manager. Typically 2 to 3 hours, it helps the sponsor to think through project start-up, or to step back and take a fresh view of the health of a project.

• Project Health Checks

An independent fresh view of a project or change programme assessing how well it is set up to deliver. It can look at both people and process aspects. Both candid and collaborative. We prefer to work with the team, from the inside out.

Any large audience which has a need to be engaged and to learn. It could be:

• A community with a shared learning theme
• An organisational group (or whole organisation) going through a change
• A large team mobilising or working on their behaviour and performance

Or you may have an awayday planned and are looking for a solution which will both engage and hit home.

When an audience connects with the experience of a central character in a story, which feels close to home, it is drawn into the story. Then, once involved, at our events, audience members can take control of the action, interacting with characters and determining the outcome.  In so doing they take ownership of the debate and their learning.  Important conversations take place which otherwise are too often skirted around. We make sure that everyone gets stuck in, whereas normally only the vocal speak out.  There is energy, pain and laughter, instead of shuffling feet and glazed eyes.

The great thing about a purpose-designed event is that you can put YOUR most important learning or change theme at the centre of the day.

We have delivered over 150 large events for over 50 clients. Examples of themes we worked with:

• New Leadership Behaviour BSKYB, Sellafield, Bombardier, British Gas, ARM, Zenith
• Cross Organisation Collaboration Leaseplan, Leeds City Council, Thales, Royal London
• Stakeholder Relationships HMGCC, Anchor, BSKYB, EDF
• Ethics Oxford Instruments
• Diversity and Inclusion Ebay, Oxford Instruments
• People and Projects Welsh Assembly, Virgin Media, DHL, PMI, Nationwide, Sellafield
• People and Change National Physical Laboratory, Red Cross, NHS, National Nuclear Laboratory
• Safety Behaviour Carillion Enterprise, Exxon Mobil
• Conversations and Trust Royal London, Mundipharma
• Making Sponsorship Work BBC, Oxford University Press, Nationwide, Infineum, Royal London, BSKYB, Network Rail, Transport for London
• Sales Behaviour Thales
• High Performing Team Relationships Royal London, Old Mutual
• Embedding Company Values Royal London
• Client Relationships and partnering EDF, Friends Life, Nationwide 

Your team may be a project or leadership team, either within your business or across a stakeholder/supplier network. You can have any team issue which inhibits delivery, such as: A stuck pattern of behaviour, difficulties in collaboration, ownership, or fractured relationships. On the other hand, it may not be a problem; you may want to celebrate team successes or to build relationships beyond the work.

We always start with you (and sometimes the team) to understand the need. The facilitator, format and duration are then chosen to fit. We work indoors or outdoors.

• Rebuilding high performing team relationships Oxford University Press, Nationwide, BT
• Celebrating team success EBay
• Building stronger supplier/partner relationships Sellafield, Nationwide, BT
• Post acquisition integration Oxford Instruments
• Collaboration across teams in Programme Delivery Leaseplan, Old Mutual
• Deepening relationships beyond the work DHL, Oxford Instruments

You may have an immediate gap in a key project role, or a project/programme whose complexity requires a more experienced hand on the tiller. Leadership roles can be from Programme Director to Project Coordinator. Or you may need to build PMO capability.

Our customers often ask us for this service because (sadly) they have become frustrated or do not trust traditional recruiters. 

We take time to understand your organisation, it's needs and culture, and then get under the specific requirement. Next, we match your requirement to our network of interims. 

This sounds just like what recruiters say, but it isn't. The quality of experience and judgment is at a higher level, and we don't body shop. We stay emerged and involved, working with our customer and the interim to set up the conditions for success, and providing back up and assurance. 

Unlike recruiters, there is no heavy fee for finding someone - our only benefit is taken from a small slice of the interim's day rate.