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Posts tagged ‘strategy’

Approach

Services

Mindtrip’s approach is performance and life focused, creative and flexible. Our aim is to help you find your inner navigator and ensure you have the tools to ride the waves of change. This is achieved through a range of people and organisational development interventions- find out more on my what we do page. 

To deliver this we work through a number of perspectives: 

positive neuroplasticity and psychology: There is currently a burgeoning amount of research in positive psychology that is practically helpful for working with individuals, teams and organisations to explore

  • How you can become more fulfilled day to day, to increases happiness and a sense of wellbeing
  • Understanding what your strengths are and how these can be put to best use
  • How managers within organisations can create flourishing environments that facilitate individuals wellbeing while at the same time prospering economically
  • Start to train to your minds to take in the good

developmental psychology: This approach explores the way that individuals make sense of the world and themselves in it. It explores how we make meaning and is particularly useful in helping Leaders look at their development to date in both a horizontal and a vertical change context. To find out more about this perspective and how it relates to leadership development there is an interesting Harvard Business Review article by David Rooke and Bill Torbert who Heather trained with.

Creativity: we are all creative, although many of us will deny this! By finding ways to build a creative outlook in life we can boost our performance and our wellbeing. Ever wondered why we have our best ideas when we are most relaxed?

compassion and self compassion: many of us, particularly those that work within the helping professions don’t spend enough time looking after ourselves. To use the metaphor of the aircraft safety briefing- do you put your own oxygen mask on first before helping others? By spending time exploring the areas of kindness and compassion we can start to build an internal safety jacket to keep ourselves afloat in times of stress and change and nourish ourselves so as to ward off burnout. See more in a blog i wrote about compassion

mindfulness: mindfulness is a way of paying attention, of being deeply attuned to yourself, your environment and those around you.  The key benefits of taking a more mindful approach to work and life are that it enables an individual over time to:

  • become more aware of the present moment and to be more acceptant and resourceful in time of stress
  • to help people to focus and concentrate, giving people greater attention and allowing for greater creativity
  • become more socially and emotionally aware, building more understanding in our relationships with others

mindtrip use’s the principles of these techniques to help us deal with constant change, ambiguity and complexity in the modern life. At an individual level, mindfulness practices can help people develop greater awareness, acceptance and choice within their lives. Interested to find out more about mindfulness? Please take a look at my mindfulness pages. 

cognitive behavioural coaching (CBC) : This is a foundation to my work. Cognitive behavioural coaching (CBC) uses solutions focused and problem solving techniques to help clients to get clearer about their intentions and start to realign their life and work based on these. The CBC philosophy centres on the fact that ‘the way we react to events is largely determined by our view of them, not by the events themselves’. CB coaching does not seek to give people the answers to their problems or difficulties, rather, through a collaborative process called guided discovery, helps people to reach their own conclusions and solutions. (Neenan & Palmer, Stress News, July 2001) CBC is particularly useful in helping clients to overcome blocks, improve performance, reduce stress, build confidence and increase emotional resilience. To find out more about CBC please read the following article by Michael Neenan and Stephen Palmer at the Centre for Coaching where Heather trained.

 

To find out more about what we can do for you please do drop me a line at hello@mindtrip.co.uk

Inspirations

Services

Heather’s inspirations, which are continually evolving, are currently being influenced by the work that is ongoing within behavioural science, creativity, mindfulness and compassion based interventions, Positive Psychology and in particular strengths based development; integrity, ethics and authenticity in Leadership Development and dealing with emotional challenges through Cognitive Behavioural Coaching. She is passionate about helping others to be the best they can be while at the same time not doing damage to others and the wider environment. Heather also has a particular interest in bringing research based psychology tools and creativity techniques to mindtrip’s work. You can find out more about some of the latest thinking that is catching her attention through subscribing to mindtrip’s blog.

Having a first degree in Economics and working within the field of occupational psychology, Heather has a particular interest in the work that spans both disciplines- behavioural sciences- and in particular the work of  Paul Dolan, Richard Layard,  and the team at action for happiness and NEF.

Wellbeing at a personal, organisational and societal level is also key to her work and she has kept up to date with the work of the Government commissioned foresight project around developing mental capital and wellbeing as well as a raft of releases from the BPS and Government and others around wellbeing. 

Heather is particularly interested in working with those that help others to prevent burnout. She is particularly influenced and inspired by the work being undertaken into love, empathy and compassion by Paul Gilbert, Tania Singer, Barbara Fredrickson, Matthieu Ricard, Kristin Neff and Sharon Salzberg. 

Case Studies- Perrywood

Services
Perrywood garden centre

Organisation Development- People, Values and wellbeing

I have been working for 18 months with Perrywood and award winning family run garden centre based in Essex and Suffolk . They have grown considerably with their success and needed help in crystallising their people strategy, finalising their values and implementing an approach to support staff wellbeing. The work started with running a happiness at work survey to establish key areas of focus and then writing and implementing a people strategy as well as a wellbeing strategy. We have taken an iterative holistic approach that looks at both the structure, policies and processes as well as culture, L&D, staff feedback and involvement as well as establishing partnerships with occupational health and EAP providers.

As part of this process we also wanted to hear staff’s views on what they thought made Perrywood special. I designed and facilitated a short workshop for all staff working more than a certain number of hours. These values have now been integrated into day to day desision making at Perrywood.

L&D

An essential part of any wellbeing strategy for an organisation is the abilities and awareness of its managers. As part of the roll out of the work staff requested more feedback on their performance and so we re-introduced 1:1 chats with a coaching approach and I trained all managers on how to have these conversations. This was rolled out to all staff.

Also designed are a series of workshops that can be delivered digitally or face to face on resilience, mental flourishing, healthy management, employee wellbeing, feedback & difficult conversations and Development & Wellbeing. 

Case Studies- London TravelWatch

Services

We worked with London TravelWatch at a time of large change helping both the staff and managers process and deal with the impact of a large downsize. We worked with them to deliver two all staff workshops around understanding and dealing with change and ensuring consistency of approach in the new organisation going forward. This latter piece of work focusing on developing the organisations values and understanding how they are lived day to day.

Thanks for delivering such a light touch but powerful workshop yesterday. It did just what I hoped

Chief Executive London TravelWatch

Case studies- Herbert Smith

Services

Change management

Over a 12-18 month month period I designed and assembled a team of 5 consultants, to deliver a large cross departmental change programme “Good to Excellent’  across support services with the focus on building a sense of community and customer service for internal and external clients. The design had 4 phases including workshops and skills boosters.

To read more about the programme and its design please click :  Herbert Smith Good to excellent Programme This was written by the OD department at Herbert Smith for an award submission.

Top Team Development

Prior to Herbert Smith’s merger, I worked over a period of seven years with the Information and Systems department. During that time I worked with them to build a sense of team within the Leadership team, each sub team within the department, across the overall department and also inter relationships between the department and other departments they worked closely with. Work included

  • Consulting, designing and facilitating tailored nine yearly top team  leadership offsites and 1:1 coaching
  • Designing and facilitating intra departmental team events
  • Designing and facilitating a series of tailored department wide team leader management development 
  • Designing and facilitating an all department conference

We needed a facilitator to help us in the critical task of coalescing the senior management team. Heather did exactly that and lived up to out high expectations.

Group Chief Information Officer, Herbert Smith LLP (now retired)

Learning & Development design and facilitation

As part of the wider change programme I ran for Herbert Smith I designed five 90-120 minute skills booster sessions focused around increasing key soft skills that the support population were particularly requesting 

Looking back and Looking forwards

January 7th, 2013

Heather Johnston

It is the time of year for thinking about resolutions and considering what the future might hold. Many of the goals set will last a matter of days and some will last the test of time. Key in thinking about the goals you set yourself at this time of year is whether they are intrinsically motivating to you- are they something you feel you ‘should’ or ‘must’ do rather than something that you are genuinely interested in.

In the following, I have listed some thoughts from the fields of positive psychology and wellbeing to help you in setting yourself up for a happy and healthy 2013:

1. Take a moment  to look back at 2012- what were the high points, what made them high? Try and relive them in your mind and savour the moments. By building savouring into your everyday you will start to look out for the good things as they happen. By taking notice of your surroundings and what makes you feel alive you will start to become more and more aware of what feeds you and what matters to you and build more of these experiences into your daily life.

2. Set some goals. By becoming clearer about  what you would like to happen we set up a chain of events that create an energy and momentum working behind the scenes on these goals. Trust your creative mind to come up with some ideas rather than feeling that you have to plan everything down to the finest detail. Recognise that goals are statements of intent and that key is the movement towards the goal and the learning along the way, not necessarily whether you achieved it totally or not. Recognise the level of mastery you are obtaining. Finally, make sure that the goals you set yourself  inspire you, work to your strengths and move towards something positive rather than away from something negative.

3. Find ways to connect with people in as many ways as you can to help build a support community for you and for them.Try and ensure a balance between virtual connection and physically being present. Give people the luxury of your total attention (minus the technology distractions)

4. Find ways to get physically active in a way that works for you be it running, walking, dancing or gardening

5. Try something new, get curious about something and find out as much as you can. Anything that helps you learn and do something that you haven’t done before. And when you have done that find something else that engages you…

6. Think about how you might give something for the benefit of others. Be it time, money, knowledge, expertise or anything else for that matter. It feels good to help others.

7. Find ways to build creativity into your life, get curious- do something that you have never done before or that surprises you. Do something completely different to what you would normally do and challenge yourself. Once you have mastered something new increase the challenge to maintain your level of stimulation and keep boredom at bay!

8. Give yourself permission to relax, stop, recharge and reflect!

 

 

 

 

Behavioural Change & Transitions Management

Services

Are you Implementing digital solutions?Restructuring? Outsourcing? Going through a merger? Reorganising and instigating a redundancy programme? Something else?

Mindtrip has experience of helping both leaders and staff to capitalise, adapt and survive through change and transitions. We will work with you to build and deliver effective behavioural change strategies that complement and enhance your business change. We can also deliver facilitated workshops along with individual and team coaching sessions that enhances understanding and the impact of behavioural change and transitions.

We use evidence based approaches, models and techniques that are embedded in the behavioural sciences including social and cognitive psychology and behavioural sciences as well as latest thinking from neuroscience and psychological coaching.

We help organisations plan for and for people to understand the emotional and social impact of transitions, help them re-assert control and open up 2 way communication and design.

For those leaving an organisation we can offer tailored careers transitions coaching and transitions workshops that focus on helping people ‘get back onto their feet’, process and understand the emotions of the transition that they are going through and support them on finding the best next step for them in their career.

Case Study

ltw-logoWe worked with London TravelWatch at a time of large change helping both the staff and managers process and deal with the impact of a large downsize. We worked with them to deliver two all staff workshops around understanding and dealing with change and ensuring consistency of approach in the new organisation going forward. This latter piece of work focusing on developing the organisations values and understanding how they are lived day to day.

Thanks for delivering such a light touch but powerful workshop yesterday. It did just what I hoped

Chief Executive London TravelWatch

Herbert smithlogoOver a 12-18 month month period I designed and assembled a team of 5 consultants, to deliver a large cross departmental change programme “Good to Excellent’  across support services with the focus on building a sense of community and customer service for internal and external clients. The design had 4 phases including workshops and skills boosters.

To read more about the programme and its design please click :  Herbert Smith Good to excellent Programme This was written by the OD department at Herbert Smith for an award submission.

Coaching (Executive, Management and Careers)

Services

I have been a coach since 2000 and use a tailored mix of cognitive behavioural coaching, positive psychology, mindfulness, heartfulness (kindness and compassion) and creativity based approaches, we will work together to see how you perceive your challenges and how different perspectives can help you to overcome and/or accept them. We will then put this into a change action/intention plan with the ultimate goal of you becoming your own coach.

My approach to coaching and leadership development focuses on building on an individual’s strengths and how a leader can best bring out those strengths in themselves and others to build engagement, motivation and results. We will also think about these strengths in relation to what the organisation needs of them and how this balances with external pressures that are being brought to bear on the individual and the organisation. I like to mix up my approach, and where appropriate in helping leaders deal with change, ambiguity and complexity, we may use  awareness and acceptance approaches such as mindfulness, compassion,  the creative arts and walking and the outdoors. I have a particular interest in working with those that are going through transitions and I also work privately as a careers coach.

Want to know what some of my clients have said about working with me, what to expect? Click helping you decide

I am able to design tailored leadership development programmes that are centred around helping current and emerging leaders understand where they are in their own personal development journey and how that aligns with what the organisation and wider society needs of them. The implementation of the programme will be tailored to the needs of the organisation and can be offered as a blended solution of one to one coaching, workshops and skills boosters combined with ‘bibliotherapy’, mentoring and action learning groups.

Please click the links to find out more about the inspirations and our approach that inform mindtrip’s coaching.

Case studies

twinings I coached a number of people over a 4 year period at Twinings. Covering those in more senior roles and those that were transitioning into manager roles. Each coachee had a tailored programme based on 3 way contracting for objective setting over a number of months with often a follow up/ refresh session after an appropriate length of time. I worked with people in procurement, marketing and finance.

Heather coached me over a 2.5 year period through a career transition into a leadership role and returning to work after having my first child. Her support has been invaluable during this time. Heathers style is relaxed and informal putting you at ease straight away. She is able to navigate any topic required with the greatest of ease moving seamlessly from one learning to another providing tools and resources with the best fit for each individuals learning style.

Joanne

St albans high school for girls copyI have coached members of the senior team at St Albans High School for girls. Either helping them to transition into new leadership roles and/or to help in their career progression

Thank you for all help with clarifying my priorities and future plans. I found our sessions hugely empowering.

Senior Teacher on Leadership Team

OD- happy, healthy and productive workplaces

Services

Research shows that developing a supportive organisational culture is as important if more than important than just focusing on individual employee interventions e.g. health and wellbeing days and training.

As part of our Organisational Development offering we will work with you to think about the wider culture that your Leadership, Management and people policies and practices create within your organisation. Through a consultancy approach, informed by wellbeing and staff survey metrics, we will look to help inform your wider people, health and wellbeing strategies, considering the lifecycle of where you are as an organisation; the natural lifecycle of employees within the organisation and the different evidence based elements that combine to create flourishing organisations.

Consideration will be taken of how ‘joined up’ your approach is, its sustainability, employee happiness, organisational culture, structure, policies and context and the impact of external influences and growth. Through taking a stock check of current practices we can work together to think about how this influences employee engagement within the organisation and work with you to build on best practices to support your organisation’s and individual’s positive future growth and wellbeing. Some of the work that I provide includes

  • Top team strategy workshops and team awaydays/retreats tailored to team needs
  • Review and/or writing people strategy
  • Writing a tailored wellbeing strategy
  • Working closely with your inhouse or other consultants to provide joined up people practices that are aligned to company values and culture and have staff wellbeing at their heart
  • Tailored workshops and facilitated sessions around eliciting company values and business strategy
  • Tailored workshops and online learning focused around healthy management and employee wellbeing
  • Team wellbeing reviews and specialist people reviews to provide objective feedback to inform your action planning and strategies
  • One to one coaching
  • Strengths based learning interventions
  • Mindfulness

Case studies

Perrywood-LogoI have been working for 18 months with Perrywood and award winning family run garden centre based in Essex and Suffolk . They have grown considerably with their success and needed help in crystallising their people strategy, finalising their values and implementing an approach to support staff wellbeing. The work started with running a happiness at work survey to establish key areas of focus and then writing and implementing a people strategy as well as a wellbeing strategy. We have taken an iterative holistic approach that looks at both the structure, policies and processes as well as culture, L&D, staff feedback and involvement as well as establishing partnerships with occupational health and EAP providers.

mind.logo.blueI have worked with two branches of mind on looking at their own staff happiness at work through an all staff  evidence based happiness survey. After completing the survey I then debriefed the results to the top teams and also to staff. Both organisations then used the results of these surveys to inform their people strategy going forward.

 

pmi-logoI worked with the Pensions Management Institute to design and facilitate a whole organisation business planning and values day ahead of the introduction of auto enrolment. These types of days are a great way of bringing teams together, to gather views of everyone on organisational strategy and values so that people feel included and heard. My approach is to add a bit of creativity in the mix so you won’t see hours of powerpoint slides!

Team Coaching & Development

Services

I bring a strategic consultancy approach to team development, designing tailored events for 5-100 people focusing on where you are now, where you want to be and what you need to do to move forward. Focus will be both on the task, process and people aspects of the team’s development be it development within an intact senior leadership team or getting teams to work effectively together across an organisation.

Mindtrip delivers a variety of approaches to team development using coaching and creative techniques, analysis from instruments and surveys as well as the latest academic research and thinking from business schools.

Case Study

Herbert smithlogoPrior to Herbert Smith’s merger, I worked over a period of Ten years with the Information and Systems department. During that time I worked with them to build a sense of team within the Leadership team, each sub team within the department, across the overall department and also inter relationships between the department and other departments they worked closely with. Work included

  • Consulting, designing and facilitating tailored nine yearly top team  leadership offsites and 1:1 coaching
  • Designing and facilitating intra departmental team events
  • Designing and facilitating a series of tailored department wide team leader management development 
  • Designing and facilitating an all department conference

We needed a facilitator to help us in the critical task of coalescing the senior management team. Heather did exactly that and lived up to out high expectations.

Group Chief Information Officer, Herbert Smith LLP (now retired)