Managing Work

Each coaching type broadly categorizes the goal being worked towards. A heading is not intended to limit the scope of coaching but to help you position yourself and your goals within a useful starting framework.

General

As the heading title suggests this is a general approach when you find yourself stuck, at a crossroads or facing an imminent change and there is little yet to guide you. The focus of this type of coaching is helping you take control of events in a way that moves you from being completely at their effect, into a position where you have some significant amount of influence. Often this is experienced as a re-framing of events which has a ripple on effect.

Relevant Experience

To a greater or lesser extent all coaching starts from this point, and so all my work has this at its core.

Strategic

Strategic work I often think of as a positioning process, starting with where you are now and where you wish to end up. It is akin to building a map and determining who or what sits where and the nature of the relationship between each position. Some positions and relationships are immediate, obvious and easy to place. Others emerge. The outcome of a strategy is a series of tactical objectives needed to reach your destination. Tactical plans emerge as you progress and knowledge and experience gained enable you to fine-tune your stratgy. The art is planning far enough ahead in sufficient detail, but not too far. It is easy to get lost and overwhelmed by a strategic plan.

Relevant Experience

Work done with start up companies, non-profits and central government agencies on a wide range of products and services.

Executive

As we progress in our careers it becomes more difficult to identify the skills we need to acquire and hone as we progress. The role of this style of coaching is to help you to figure out where you are now and what is needed to get you to the next stage. For senior executives and owner managers we take a broader view which helps to determine delegation, command structures and information flow within your organization.

Relevant Experience

Modern businesses and organizations do not always have an immediately clear production/delivery process. I have a number of tools that help you to analyze, visualize and communicate the actual working structure. These I have used with my own businesses and with client companies and organizations.

Leadership and Management

When should you be leading and when should you be managing? How do you flag the difference to your staff and co-workers? What do these mean in your area of expertise? These are just a few of the interesting challenges people face as they advance in their career. Short term results can be gained quickly by directly managing. Longer term stability and performance are gained by leading others to manage. Management is usually easier to define, something like this: get this from this place, do that with it, send it over there and now do the same again is the typical repetitive sequence management aims to achieve. Leadership enrolls people into your mission, empowers them to achieve more than they expect and rewards them with the joy of being able to significantly influence outcomes. Both leadership and management skills are necessary and needed.

Relevant Experience

This comes from developing my own leadership and management skills in business and life and working with many managers and business leaders going through our AIM process.

Personal - Life Change

Life change can be imposed by events you are caught up in or something you wish to initiate. The focus of this style is on identifying the dream or vision you have for the type of life you wish to lead once you have passed through the change. Expect to do a significant amount of troubleshooting work during this type of change, first clarifying your dream and then while getting it working. The most challenging step is the very first one. The missing ingredient is often simply courage.

Relevant Experience

If you have read my bio, you will probably see I have been through many incarnations. Some unexpected and unwilled, others I have initiated. As a general rule I anticipate re-training myself in a major skill set every five to seven years.

Productivity and Achievement

The pace of life is extraordinary, at no time in history have we been individually so productive. We have at our beck and call amazing tools and services but still more is demanded. Much of the productivity limitations are internal in our information processing, storage and retrieval. Unhappiness and discontent with life are symptoms of an overuse. But an overuse of what? This style of coaching is what we most often do with AIM, but it also can take place one-on-one. The key is the way you manage your attention. Change this and you will find you get back huge amounts of attention

Relevant Experience

I have personally taken hundreds of people through this process and trained twelve other people in how to achieve the same results.

Business Start Up

Stepping out from a job into your own nascent business doesn't simply double your work load, there is an immediate seven fold increase. Also, you leave behind a whole raft of resources you can no longer rely on being just a phone call away. Now its up to you. There are so many challenges I cannot possibly begin to list them. If you are there now you already know, if you are thinking about it then be prepared for a explosion of involvement. This style of coaching works with the role of the founder, and I encourage you to think about the different hats your business needs and which ones you are wearing, which you need to give up (delegate) and how you plan on addressing the issue of quality through the process.

Relevant Experience

At some point I have done it all wrong, picked up the ball and figured out how to do it right. There is no better insight gained that that of messing up. If I can help you step around some of these so much the better. There is no standard formula for avoiding every pitfall, but there are some very sound principles you really need to think twice about before going against them.

Analyzing and Troubleshooting an Organization

Manufacturing organizations are easier to analyze and understand than service based or hybrid organizations (mixed service and tangible product). Simply follow the material flow and note what is needed and a manufacturing set up will gradually yield its secrets. This coaching focuses upon the harder service/hybrid structures of most modern businesses, where the emergence of the final added value is not so easy to follow in the day-to-day activity.

Relevant Experience

I have worked in a wide range of each type of business and built two hybrid businesses. Also I have applied the same concepts to government agencies and education with equal veracity.

Product/Service Development

There are two aspects to this, generation of a product or service from concept to delivery and the linking of the development to the operational business model. It is easy to create a fault line between the business and the developers. Usually there are one or two key aspects of the product and the business model that need to be defined and closed monitored throughout the development process.

Relevant Experience

My first lesson in this was in my last ever job working for someone else, designing battery electric vehicle traction control electronics. An extraordinarily complex process was reduced to a three step process that on one side the business managers could use to size and scale production. On the other side the engineers could use to keep their work within commercial tolerances. It has proven to be one heck of a good template for all sorts of situations. Our AIM process is a good example of this applied to a highly personalized service. We offer a fixed price with an unlimited on-site follow-up warranty. This takes away uncertainty on all sides. A customer knows there are going to be no hidden costs. We as a service provider can scale operations easily from one person upwards and the delivering consultant/coach knows precisely what to do and how to do it, but has great flexibility in ensuring a successful outcome. Product development with this approach guiding it has greater certainty in its eventual outcome.

Resolving Confrontational Situations

Confrontation absorbs huge amounts of attention and energy. Avoiding it and resolving those you cannot avoid helps minimizes the brutal attrition involved. A conflict is a visible manifestation of a misalignment of goals coupled with an overriding need to deploy resources you don't own. There are other ways of going about satisfying the need without conflict.

Relevant Experience

I spent ten years re-financing a growing company in the face of aggressive attempted takeovers. We became masters of defusing and resolving these, mostly by initially getting it wrong. Later, with a disabled son I was horrified to find that our social health care system seemed hell bent on turning every interaction into a full scale battle. Social services and education showed an equal suicidal tendency. At one point I found myself championing 80 disabled families through a range of confrontations with various agencies. Most of these we resolved using non-violent techniques which not only consumed less energy and attention but got our goals aligned and access to resources opened up. The crossover experience working with my business and the families was amazing.

Being a Parent of a Disabled Child

Few other challenges are so demanding, emotionally and physically - in fact at every conceivable level. The ripples flow outwards into grand parents, siblings, aunts and uncles and beyond. No area of life is unchanged. I have heard people who have been professionally involved with disabled children all their working life say when it happened to them they had no idea just how bad it really is. There is no answer, however there are 'least worst options' that can be activated as positive ways ahead. So often the medical help and investigation involved leaves you without a clear view of the person you are trying to help. Seeing your child as a living human being with a future, instead of a broken object that cannot somehow be fixed is one frequent starting point.

Relevant Experience

We have walked the path, in fact continue to walk it. Creative and unusual solutions are possible. Apart from the obvious personal involvement I was for eight years Chairman of a UK charity for brain damaged babies, and my son's mum and I spent a lot of time with parents in the early stages of diagnosis. Later we talked with social workers and health care professionals about the inner working of our 'disabled family'. For seven years I headed up a family group of nearly 100 such families, helping sort our problems, build alternative futures and some times just cope. For the past 12 years I have been a founding board member and past President of a US non profit that supports 900 people in independent living.

Dyslexia and Your Child or Partner

Dyslexia is potentially an isolating label. It manifests as a range of problems, often within sequencing, numeracy or written language skills. I've come to view it as a different and potentially valuable way some people have of organizing themselves. How the dyslexic and non-dyslexic individuals see and experience the world is defined around these different approaches to organization. This coaching focuses upon exploring and understanding the scope of the differences, what they might mean and how best to harness the differences to achieve unusual outcomes. Being described as dyslexic is not all doom and gloom, far from it. It offers some unusual gifts, the art is in determining how best to use the gifts. How do I justify this stance? Doing AIM with senior managers over a twelve year period I noticed a high percentage of them exhibited strong dyslexic tendencies. I would estimate up to 20% in total. In biological/evolutionary terms dyslexia appears to confer a strong survival advantage for our species, otherwise why is it so prevalent?

Relevant Experience

Both my daughter and I are dyslexic. As are a number of friends. It is a good starting point. Over the years I have worked with and discussed being dyslexic with a wide range of people; parents and recently diagnosed children included. For the past couple of years I have also been one of a number of subjects of a Phd student's research with the attendent opportunity to explore dyslexia in a wider context. My 20 Point Guide to the No Plan Style of Living was used in a young offenders institute to great effect with a class of dyslexic young people.