Coaching on Difficult People and Improving Performance

Make Your Life So Much Easier

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Never have enough time to get anything done?
Other people making your life difficult?
Feeling really stressed and can’t see a way forward?

I can make your life better - quickly.

You will be able to solve your problems. It doesn’t have to be like this.

To book your coaching call me on 01483 811418 or contact me.

Key coaching areas

Dealing with difficult behaviours and bullying. Sometimes problems are more around the way people do things, rather than what they achieve. (Of course it can be both.)

We will work with you and give you ways to:

Deal with difficult colleagues
Deal with difficult customers
Deal with difficult people in your team
Develop confidence

Is it that you just need more confidence but don't know where to get it? We do and we can help you to develop it yourself.

Usually there are a few simple things you can do that will make a huge difference.


Time Management. Too much to do and not enough time to do it? Too many people making too many demands on your time? Not enough hours in the day? Stressed to breaking point?

We help you to solve those problems with straightforward, easy to implement strategies and techniques that will change your life for ever.


Tackling underperformance. This can be very hard for some managers. We will help you with:

Where to start
How to set the standards
What to say in a meeting with someone who is not performing effectively

And, if you would like us to, 

We will coach the individual who is not performing

Improving team performance. Many managers need help in this area. We will support managers through this process so that they:

Know how to tackle each team member
Have the tools to set the required standards
Know how to get team members working together
Make sure that each team member is contributing to the team goals.

We have worked with managers at all levels from board members to team leaders. Once a manager can resolve problems in a team and really get it working effectively the performance of the whole can rocket and give you what you need.

To book your session call me on 01483 811418

The Team From Hell
I worked recently with a senior manager who had been given a new team to look after. He was initially concerned that they might be a bit of a problem.
After just three weeks, he realised their problems ran deeper than his worst nightmares.

He was working every waking hour, they weren’t doing their jobs properly, were causing all kinds of problems with their departments and the deeper he dug, the worse it got.

We had our first session one afternoon in his office. He arrived looking tired and pale. He started pouring out his problems. They sounded pretty bad.
He’d asked one man to provide some simple figures on what his department had achieved and had been met with excuse after excuse. He had discovered, quite by accident that one of the women had refused to sell a core product to a major customer, costing the company millions.

She didn’t really think that the company should be going down that route (it was completely aligned with the published strategy from the previous year).
Another team member bullied her staff, shouting and swearing at them on a regular basis.

Not one of them turned up at his meetings prepared. They had not read the agenda, they had not carried out their actions from the previous meetings. During the meeting it was no better. They seemed in capable of thinking strategically, and spent all the time bickering about problems and blaming each other for their own failings.

None of the team had a plan of how their department was going to achieve the tough new company goals (vital for its success).
I’m sure you can imagine why he was in such a state.

I spent four hours going through with him:

How to set clear standards
How to get people to come to his meetings prepared
How to monitor the performance of each of his team
How to deal with each of the different characters (and he had some very awkward ones)
How to get his people to produce plans for their departments

At the end of the session he said “When I came in I thought this was all their fault, now I realise it’s my fault. But this good thing is, I know what I can do about  that now.”

We agreed to meet again in two weeks’ time. During that time I heard from a colleague that he was making progress.

When I next saw him I could hardly believe the change. He was bursting to tell me how he’d got on. Yes, it had been hard, but he had already made great progress.

He had set the standards with each of them individually. They had not been happy. They had not realised what they were supposed to be doing. Their previous manager had not made the standards clear. He had allowed them to carry on underperforming for years, and given them to believe that they were doing well.

However, after an initial ‘grumpiness’ ,  they had realised that he wasn’t joking and that they had better get down to work.

Over the next few weeks he put more time into getting them the help they needed to develop the skills they had lacked.
The results:

He has fewer meetings (50% fewer)
The meetings he does have are far more productive
They now have an overall plan and each has a workable departmental plan for achieving the company goals
Most importantly, he now goes home on time most evenings and has time to see his family again.

At work, his hours are no longer soaked up sorting out disputes between members of the team, or resolving problems they have caused.
He is able to focus on his job and develop the strategy that will keep the company going and move it into a much more successful future.

 

To find out more call me on 01483 811418

Escape From the Bullying Manager
A senior department head came to me because he was having problems with his manager. She was treating him very badly and his appraisal was coming up. He was terrified that she would manufacture things to make him look so bad that he’d be fired.

We had two sessions, going through her behaviour, the evidence that she had and the evidence he had.

It turned out that he had had excellent reviews up till this time. Then he made one very small mistake in a document (and I mean small) and she completely flipped her lid. He rectified it immediately before anyone else saw it. From then on he could do nothing right in her eyes.

His concern was that he had seen what had happen to several previous colleagues and was very worried he would be her next victim.

We practiced what he was going to say; his responses, his questions and his body language. It took about 90 minutes in total.

A few days later he brought me a bottle of good champagne (not usually included in my fee) because he was so relieved and delighted that the meeting had gone so well.

“I did what you said and it worked!” He said, with complete amazement. The appraisal had gone smoothly, he got the satisfactory rating he needed and she agreed he could move to another department.

Working Long Hours?
I worked with a man recently who realised he had a problem because he was having to work such long hours and it had been going on for a long time.
It was a problem I’d seen many times before. I was able to help him identify some actions to take immediately to give himself some improvement. He then did some analysis and we worked out some strategies to help him cut his working time down further in just a couple of hours.

After the initial, and substantial, improvements reducing his extra hours from three a day on average to three a week, we then focussed on other underlying issues.

These turned out to be mainly due to a specific person in his team, Tim. Tim was soaking up hours every day and stopping my client from getting on with his real work and long term planning.

Tim would phone, send lengthy emails and generally cause problems with other team members complaining about problems he had to deal with and often misinterpreting information he had been given.

After identifying strategies for dealing with this very annoying behaviour, my client found he had an extra hour every day that meant he was able work on his long term plans and strategies.

He now leaves the office at 5pm most days and doesn’t spend his evenings working.

The Lazy Team Member
Andrew, who worked in a research organisation, had a member of his team that he felt was lazy and untrustworthy. He found that Gill’s was slow and she couldn’t be trusted to deliver on time. He didn’t know what to do about it.

I worked with Gill to find out what was going on. It turned out that Andrew was unwittingly causing most of the problems himself. I’m sorry to say, this is very often the case. With just a few small changes, we managed to make drastic improvements.

Gill was in fact a hard-working employee who had just a couple of development needs. One problem was that she hated letting people down.

The people she worked with were from other departments. She would perform specific tests for them on the chemicals they provided to her. They would always ask her when they could have the results, but she wouldn’t tell them.

This was because she just didn’t know how to estimate properly. I showed her how to learn this in just ten minutes. After two weeks she had trained herself in this new skill and it made a huge difference to her and to the department. She was much happier because she was able to give a better service and her manager was delighted.

The other problem was that her manager was constantly changing the priorities and asking Gill to drop everything and do something else. He had no idea how disruptive this was. Gill liked to work in an orderly calm manner and this behaviour was not only very annoying it was also extremely inefficient, causing many of the problems that Andrew had complained about.

As soon as he changed his own behaviour and became more organised, the rest of the problems disappeared.


Our Coaching Service - Costs
We help people just like you to resolve problems with the people that you work with and with time management, or working too long. The people can be members of your team, your colleagues or even your boss. We do it by phone or face to face.

We start with an exploratory phone call to see if we can help. The first 15 minutes is free.

Telephone Coaching

£125 + VAT/half hour for telephone coaching

For face to face coaching

£2500 + VAT/day (or two half days for different people at the same location)
£2000 + VAT/half day

We give discounts for long term coaching or for projects.

What’s Different About Our Coaching?
We do it quickly. Sometimes we can help people in half an hour, sometimes it takes longer. It all depends on the problem and what you want to achieve.

To book your coaching contact me giving details of what you need or call me on +44 (0)1483 811418