Chris Smith

I am motivated to help businesses achieve sustainable success, meeting strategic goals, while being great places to work and caring for our environment. My aim is to enable people to work in a more collaborative, supportive and agile way, to better contribute to wider business goals. This may involve generating a shift in overall culture, developing new leadership capacities and building stronger relationships.

My approach is to create an environment of trust in which we can work constructively, facilitating change through increased self-awareness, offering new perspectives and making deeper connections between people. I come alongside the people and teams I work with, listening, supporting and challenging them. Change comes from building on existing strengths and disrupting unhelpful patterns, offering a basis to think, feel and behave differently which generates individual growth, greater team effectiveness and business change. I draw on a wide range of frameworks, theories, and resources from my professional development and built-on through several years of experience, working with leaders and teams around the world.

I take a systemic and relational perspective in all my work, with a focus on exploring together to clarify desired outcomes and develop steps toward them.

Clients greatly value my focus on and care for them. They also appreciate my ability to connect strategic and systemic perspectives with what is happening for them personally. I have experience as both a coach and a business leader, working in and with organisations from SME’s to larger national (public and private) and international businesses, in a range of sectors. I have been a Board Director in a small, fast-growth business and led a global function in a FTSE quoted business. I’ve worked with others on achieving strategic goals, such as landing growth opportunities, culture change, downsizing, and business integration.

I coach senior leaders and rising talent, especially as they lead change in their business or step into new roles that require them to expand their leadership. In coaching executive teams, I help them clarify their purpose, improve ways of working and the quality of relationships, both internally and with key stakeholders. I have trained people as coaches and team coaches and provide supervision to in-house and independent coaches.

Examples of coaching/supervisor work

Senior Team in a major telecoms firm: I worked with the team over several months as they worked through a key strategic change for their function within a significant global business. I worked on their purpose and the strategy going forward, shifted the quality of their relationships and also how they exercised leadership in the function and across the business. They led a substantive shift in leadership style across the function, with a greater focus on coaching others to increase agility, empowerment and responsiveness. This was critical to a raise their contribution to the business as a whole.

Exec Director in a local authority: I worked with this leader around two outcomes, at a pivotal time in her life. The immediate issue was how to be more effective in working with others. She had come from a very different background to her colleagues and wanted to shift the way she connected with them to be increase her impact. She quickly became more confident and effective in her work. In time, this led to exploring the next steps in her career and we worked through some deep issues about what most mattered to her and where she might best use her talents, in this stage of her life. She has now moved into a successful consulting career.

Supervision – Leader as Team Coach: I worked with one of the large professional services firms to develop the capabilities of senior partners in leading their teams, using a team coaching approach. As part of this process, I provided supervision on team coaching, both to the Partners themselves and to some of the in-house coaches who worked alongside them. This supervision also helped to generate insights on organisational patterns that could be used to accelerate a shift in the overall culture of the firm.

Qualifications and Experience

BA(Oxon), MBA

FCIPD, FRSA

Accredited as Master Executive Coach and Master Team Coach with APECS

Certified as a Team Coach by the Academy of Executive Coaching (and taught others)

Trained as a Transformational Coach and Coaching Supervisor with Bath Consultancy Group (and taught others)

Qualified to use various psychometric and other instruments including MBTI Step 2, Harthill LDF, EQi2.0, Smart Collaboration Accelerator