Professional Coach in the UK, Africa and the Middle East

Over the years, I learnt a great deal about business, organisations, people and cultures.

I have had diverse challenges - rebuilding a business after a war, turning around a company mired in losses; I bought businesses, created companies, restructured business regions, developed and launched new products.

 

Amongst all the successes (and the occasional failure!), over the years I have been repeatedly struck by the crucial importance of the human element: the soft stuff of business as it is so often denigratingly described.

 

And the particularly devastating observation that I constantly recorded, was that pro-active and targeted ‘people support’, as offered by employers is either woefully inadequate or more often, completely lacking. As a consequence, massive opportunities for business improvement are lost simply because employees at all levels are left to develop and grow by themselves, at best aided by the occasional training course – which often delivers a negligible ROI.

The sad fact is that whilst there may be very competent managers out there with impressive technical skills – very few know how to manage people and therefore translate those technical competencies into performance excellence.