We focus on areas where organisations can raise the bar on performance, productivity and profit. We ensure that any work we do has clear line of sight to specific business outcomes of value to the organisation, so that a solid return on time, energy and investment is realised.
We are experts in the process of unlocking potential and focusing this in the right ways on the right outcomes and we excel at emotionally engaging leaders and teams to own change.
We are proud of our ability to deliver strategically significant outcomes; using our experience and specialist human performance skills we co-create assignments designed to ensure the outcomes we deliver are tailored to meet your needs. Consequently, what we deliver varies enormously: from designing and delivering value for time conferences that people enjoy attending - that actually deliver business benefit - to developing leadership teams and the top talent needed to fuel the leadership pipeline.
What makes our work unique is the ability to blend our hard edged business performance experience with the softer people development and engagement skills needed to create sustainable performance improvement.
In short ... ‘We do the really hard part of the soft stuff’
On this web page we have clustered our work into five take to market solution sets that give a flavour of the types of areas we typically help our clients with. If you hover your cursor over the relevant button, you will see a brief overview of the work we do in each area.
Breakthrough Coaching
Our approach to executive coaching is distinctive because we combine our classical coaching skills with our extensive consultancy, training and facilitation experience to create the ability to help leaders deliver performance outcomes that make a significant difference in their organisation.
Our solid consulting and business acumen is derived from working with many of the leading companies in the world. This experience along with our proven coaching tools helps our clients elicit issues, reframe assumptions, explore alternatives and tap the energy and the will necessary to change. We provide support for new actions, reinforce successes, challenge complacency and provide a direct accountability loop that actively involves the line manager in the coaching process. We also have the knowledge and experience to teach appropriate performance improvement tools as required, ensuring a Sensei coaching contract is one that delivers both individual and organisational benefits.
To find out how Sensei’s breakthrough coaching approach can help you achieve significant improvements please click here.
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Value for Time Conferences
The annual conference, a vital communication and motivational tool designed to engage people in the exciting journey that is the future! At least that’s what the posters usually say, yet all too often the results fall far short of expectations and neither the organisation nor the participants benefit greatly from the significant investment in time and money that these ritualistic events require.
The reality for many is best summed up by Peter Drucker who said “I like company conferences, they are great habitual events where the really important things are said over cocktails and are never done”
Our view is that any conference is a rare opportunity to engage people in the organisation’s strategic journey and tap into their latent desire to be involved. Like all great journeys we make the conference have an air of anticipation and excitement beforehand; a clear roadmap to guide progress along the way; space for adventure and discovery built into the trip; and a desired destination that makes all the effort and expense worthwhile.
To find out how Sensei’s Value For Time Conferences can break the mould and help you achieve strategic business aims that make the investment in time and money worthwhile then please click here. To see how Danone benefited from this innovative and engaging solution, please click here.
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Leadership Journeys
Our Leadership Journeys represent the next frontier in leadership and leadership team development. The concept was born out of a desire to bring the best of our years of Leadership Development work together with Mother Nature and the great outdoors in a powerful combination that can deliver a real shift in personal and team performance.
Leaders who wish to go beyond simple ‘teambuilding’ and want to forge a community that can act as a crucible for ongoing personal and team breakthroughs use our Leadership Journey approach. We have also adapted the approach to offer High Potential Leaders a way to accelerate their development, unlocking their potential and giving them the best possible preparation for future leadership roles.
We have truly exciting Journeys already proven in the UK, Spain, France, Turkey, Vietnam, South Africa, Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka and the United States.
Participants 'journey' together, moving from one experience to another. The experiences are all safe, with strong logistics support and medical back-up. They are culturally varied, for example farming with a local community in Vietnam, learning horse whispering in the Cotswolds, helping a centre for artists with disabilities in Malaysia create a marketing plan for their products, learning falconry in Scotland, hiking the French Trail in Vietnam, exploring mangroves in Malaysia, doing an ’Amazing Race’ experience through Istanbul, dancing with the Cape Town Minstrels in South Africa, etc.
A Sensei Journey typically takes 3 days. In between the travelling and the varied experiences - some of them physical, some educational, some cultural, some with social contribution dimensions - various conversations take place, or ’learning dialogues’ as we like to call them. Some of these dialogues are about gaining greater insight into you as a person, a leader and a team-member. Others are about getting ‘feed-forward’ comments from colleagues based on participation and contribution to various projects and experiences throughout the Journey. The dialogues can also be used to tackle a business challenge that requires a new radical thought process to unblock an existing constraint and deliver a new way of working. In this way the business gets a real return on investment as well as the leaders who attend.
If you would like to hear more about the concept of our Leadership Journeys, please click here to watch our video. To read some of the testimonials provided by leaders of our global clients who have experienced this radical new approach to leadership development, please click here. The e-book below describes how Sensei Leadership Journeys can benefit high potential managers and their organisations.
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Embedding Change
Organisations that have the capability to change effectively are stronger and future proof. This is perceived wisdom that few would argue with, but to achieve this capability is easier said than done. ‘Change or die’ is a clarion call that is echoing around board rooms across the land especially during the current global recession. The phrase acts as a ‘call to arms’ as organisations are forced to re-engineer, re-brand or re-establish winning behaviours and values in order to survive and grow. To make the call to arms is easy; to make the required change it demands however takes a bit more thought.
At Sensei we believe that effectively embedding change requires the following 4 fundamental principles:
- Change must have a clear strategic mandate and be linked to a compelling vision.
- The change must be driven top down and bottom up.
- The approach to embedding change must be holistic and systemic.
- Focus should be on changing actual behaviours not just rhetoric and enthusiasm.
Our approach to sustainable behavioural change is based on experience gathered from working across a wide range of industry sectors with many of the leading organisations around the world. We do not impose a rigid approach or overly structured methodology, preferring instead to collaborate with our clients, combining their knowledge, passion and understanding of their business with our experience, to create an effective approach to change that fits with their unique organisational DNA.
To ensure we deliver outcomes that count we adopt an approach that typically covers the following steps:
- Understanding, diagnosing and evaluating to develop a clear strategic mandate and a compelling rationale for change.
- Collaborating to build a change implementation plan that will deliver sustainable change.
- Supporting the execution of this plan, providing coaching, consulting, training and facilitating as required.
- Tracking and monitoring progress, providing the ability to course correct as and when needed.
- Ensuring sustainability by reviewing progress with the key leaders to truly embed and lock new behaviours into the organisation.
If you need your organisation and your people to change the way they behave in order to deliver the business performance you require, Sensei can help.
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Tap the Influentials
Every large organisation has two types of organisation chart. The one published on the internal website, appearing in the process manuals and shown on wall charts; and the one that is never published but is used every day by people ‘in the know’ when they want to get things done. It is this reality that has led Sensei to develop an approach to change and people development that works with this ethereal organisational reality.
Our work in this area will help you identify those key players in the organisation that are ‘influential’ in that they are well connected, add value in all the transactions they make and have built informal communities of interest through which they get things done. In large organisations we work with our partner Katzenbach, now part of Booze and Co, who can deploy their organisational tools and techniques to map this informal network.
Once we have identified these ‘influentials’ we look to network them together and build a powerful change community that can be used to deliver all kinds of change in support of your strategic intent. Our role is to forge this group into a genuine community of influential’s and provide them with the skills, knowledge and enthusiasm required to become a powerful force in driving change throughout the business.
Many of our clients have asked us to design and deliver development programmes for what they call their ‘high potentials’. As well as delivering against this brief we will also ensure they recognise such a group can become a powerful resource in the fight to deploy strategic aims.
Creating a fully engaged and enthused community of influential leaders throughout the organisational hierarchy and spanning the usual functional and geographic divide is a real asset that will help your organisation deliver sustainable change and make it ‘future proof’.
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