Category: Coaching and Mentoring
Virtual coffee – the new coffee house is at home!
With the advent of social distancing meeting for a coffee is not possible at the moment. That doesn’t mean we should stop interacting though.
I have met some great new people and had some fantastic discussions. If you would like to meet for a virtual coffee, either comment on this post or get in touch on the contact page.
Stay safe
I feel for the extroverts who need to self isolate, your world collapsing to a single building must feel awful. It’s easy to lose focus and be overwhelmed by your brains all too human desire to catastrophise and focus on the negative. Rest assured you are not alone, we all have some degree of this to manage.
Also, spare a thought for those of us who find shouting about what we do difficult. Introverts enjoy the isolation, but that doesn’t mean it is good for them. We need to be shouting about what we do, but it isn’t easy.
I am an introvert. My customers tell me I do a great job, however, me telling others feels like boasting. I push through it, but it’s uncomfortable.
What I can do is listen. It is one of the blessings of introversion, listening is easy. I can also see complex patterns in data, be it big number sets or the things you tell me as your coach.
Whatever else you do with this time, don’t sit and worry until it becomes too much. Find someone to talk to, share your fears and concerns be they personal or business focused.
Stay safe, the world will change, we just need to be ready to adjust when we can get back to our lives.
Coaching – lifelong learning skills for improvement
It’s true. Some people don’t believe they have anything left to learn. I was taught that learning is a lifelong habit and that when we believe we have all the answers, we have surrendered our intellect and allowed our ego to take charge. So who is in control of your life, your intellect or your ego?
Coaching supports your journey to understand why you create your own limitations and helps you to learn how to change how you interact with the world. Being yourself can never be wrong, changing how you interact with the world can help everyone else to see your talents as well.
If you think coaching could help you be happier, healthier and more effective, get in touch to arrange a discussion.
Tamarind Tree Consulting Ltd joins Centre For SME Development
Tamarind Tree Consulting Ltd has joined the Centre for SME Development, a UCLAN initiative to help and support small businesses and new startups.
AS a member of this group Tamarind Tree Consulting Ltd can help new businesses to develop their processes and support the managers and directors to grow with the business. Tamarind Tree Consulting Ltd looks forward to the opportunity to support these entrepreneurs by coaching and mentoring these new business leaders to develop the skills they will need as their businesses grow

Case Study: Team Coaching in FMCG

I was invited by a close associate to work with him at a large FMCG manufacturer where he worked to help improve team performance. This team works in central services in an extremely large multinational corporation.
I arrived at the location on a Sunday evening and in the car journey to the hotel, my client advised that he wanted to change the focus of the development. Instead of working with the full team, I was to work with a smaller sub-team. My client advised that this sub-team was having particular problems with delivering their expected objectives. My revised task was to support the sub-team to identify what help was needed to develop their skills and improve overall performance. The sub team’s role is to approve new suppliers.
I created a team development workshop overnight and we started the next day looking at the team’s behaviours and output. We quickly identified several problems
- The process was inconsistent between team members
- The process was also inconsistently completed between departments.
- The team was governed through fear, carried over from a previous manager
- There were no measures of team performance
- The team was still working to a set of rules laid down by a former manager
The impact of these behaviours was that the staff were uncertain and working in constant fear. Failure to deliver was normal, all failures were blamed on people, and external demands were never challenged. This increased the workload in the department without adding value from the customer’s perspective. As a result, the team had become demotivated and disillusioned
I had two issues. The first was to understand and support the overall process. The second was to work with the individuals to help them improve their skills and resilience.
We employed three strategies to develop in parallel
- Focus on the process to identify and agree on the standard work.
- Work with the individuals to help them identify as a team and start collaborating
- Coach the individuals to enable them to understand their reactions and interact more positively
The strategies worked very well, by applying transformational coaching across the needs of the immediate client, recognising the demands of the wider organisation and the constraints individual team members perceived, we made huge step-change improvements in performance. The client (this team’s line manager) was coached to modify his behaviours to reflect the values agreed with the team. Individuals in the team were also coached to address their confidence and behavioural challenges. Working with the team, we were able to establish common values and establish the required process to enable the team to work effectively as a unit and in concert with other parts of the business. Since the process was developed by the team with support and guidance by me, they were fully engaged with the process.
After completing the intervention, the team identified that they needed to enforce the existing agreement and insist their customer, another internal department, upheld their part of the agreement. The team also stopped competing and arguing internally, focusing instead on solving problems at their root cause. The overall result was a reduction in workload and a higher quality of work product. The team also had higher engagement, morale, and created a positive and supportive working environment.
The work was so successful that further engagements were booked to deliver training and development with this team and with other teams in the business. A team build for another team in the department is planned for later in the year. I continue to coach the team director to support his development.
Do this one thing to speed up your culture change!
Culture change. It’s a huge and popular topic these days. There are so many departments that want to lead this area, human resources, change management, finance, organisational design, manufacturing, the list is as varied as the department names your business uses. Everyone tries their own strategy, but they all run into the same problem;
“Culture determines and limits strategy”
– Edgar H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 1985
So why does culture keep reasserting itself, no matter how much well-meaning change management is brought in. Internal consultants, external consultants, charismatic leaders, servant leaders, there are more leadership models than you can shake a stick at. Yet still, the culture reasserts itself, it is pervasive and incredibly hard to change. Why?
Culture change efforts always focus on changing behaviours. It is right that behaviours must change, but with all these skilled people changing behaviours, why doesn’t the culture change?
Johnson and Scholes proposed a model of culture in their cultural web. There are many aspects to culture, and it is vitally important to connect each of the aspects of the cultural web to the values and beliefs required for our new culture.

One of the aspects of Johnson and Scholes cultural web that seems to be overlooked is Stories.
In every aspect of life, we tell stories, and these stories grow to be an oral history of the underlying “common sense” values and beliefs in the business. As change agents we work really hard to change behaviours, but how much effort do we put into changing the stories told? If we change behaviours to conflict with the stories in the business, we set new behaviours in conflict with the historical values and beliefs of the business. We start to hear comments such as “I know we aren’t supposed to say this, but…” or see the more experienced heads in the business purse their lips or shake their heads when new processes or behaviours are implemented. The old stories subside, but they don’t go away, they are instead told in quiet corners to select groups. The problem is the select groups overlap, so the story is still told as the history of the business, and the new behaviours are labelled as “the latest fad” and members are told to “just keep your head down and ride it out”. We create cliques and cabals to either protect our history or We can’t just suppress the old stories, and we can’t create new stories fast enough to displace the old values.
So what is the one thing that must be changed?
You can’t eliminate the story since it is part of the oral history of the business, so use it by changing the perspective of the story! Don’t just focus on changing behaviour, ensure the stories told in the business reflect the changing values and beliefs. Us the telling and retelling of the stories to change how the stories are interpreted and understood.
For example, if you have a hero culture and stories are told about how people have cut through bureaucracy to find solutions to past situations, just telling people not to tell the story won’t work. Telling people to obey the bureaucracy won’t work. Change the emphasis of the story to match the new belief system; add to the story, for example, add that whilst it was a brilliant outcome, highlight that there was a huge risk to the business from missing paperwork, and we were lucky to get away with it. When you get an example of the bureaucracy controlling the process and preventing an error, add a positive that using the bureaucracy has enabled the business to meet the customer needs. Once the change is embedded the story is changed forever. Reality hasn’t been changed, there is no deception, we have interpreted the old story in line with our new values. All the while we are telling new stories, stories that support the new values and beliefs.
In this way, we accelerate the culture change by adding new stories and modifying the interpretation of the old stories to match the modified cultures and beliefs embedded in the business. Be careful though, if you just tell people to interpret the story differently you will drive it into the shadows. The new interpretation must be through storytelling in collaboration with the people who guard the business beliefs and used to flush out conflicts between new and old values in a positive way for discussion and debate.
In summary, if you want to change the way your business behaves, change the stories that are told in and by the business both new and old.
What story will you change today?
New and improved coaching and mentoring

I have recently finished the classroom studies for ILM Level 7 Certificate in Executive Coaching and Mentoring. I have been coaching for about 15 years and decided this year it was time to invest in formal qualifications to back up the skills I have. Although I have been coaching for a long time, it is only recently that I have identified this as an important skillset and opportunity. I started doing small business mentoring with Boost about 2 years ago,and over the course of the last 2 years, I have been blessed with amazingly positive feedback. I then started helping a former colleague who was struggling to get his team to deliver on business objectives. Whilst helping him, he and his team identified that I was very good at coaching. I got comments such as “You really see people don’t you?”. Someone even commented that I was very good at this.
Having had this feedback I decided to go get some formal qualifications, after all, I had been doing it for many years it should not be too difficult. Then I had another thought. How much would I learn if I started with the view that I already knew all I needed to? So I revisited my thought process and decided to start assuming that I would learn new things. I am so glad I made the change in my viewpoint! I was blessed to work with an outstanding group and some great teachers. Along the way, I learned some new techniques that helped me to strengthen what I already know and some new tools that took me out of my comfort zone. These new tools are really important. One of the things I realised is that I am very good at coaching and mentoring people like me. I am not so sure I would be as good coaching and mentoring someone who was very different until now. The new tools were uncomfortable since they demanded that I engaged in a different way. Having got past my discomfort, I now feel much better equipped to help more people.
The outcome then is that I now have more tools available that can be
used to supplement and complement the tools I have been using for years.
What is coaching?
The way I define coaching is the activity of helping the client find the best solutions to their problems by asking them the questions they can’t think of or articulate, then supporting them to find their best answers.
What is Mentoring?
Mentoring is using the mentor’s knowledge and wisdom to guide the client to develop their own insights, knowledge and breakthroughs and from that create their own wisdom.

What next?
The next step for me is to continue learning and helping others. People often leave it too late to ask for help, meaning instead of coaching and mentoring to help them early on in their issue, they get caught in firefights and don’t make time to find help.
In case you are wondering why the pictures of buttons, these were a coaching tool that felt very uncomfortable until I understood it. One of the new tools uses buttons to help start meaningful conversations. This was something I would never have thought of.
The question you have to ask is could I be your button, the key that unlocks your potential and helps you become the best possible version of yourself. If I can, get in touch here