You’d be surprised how much your organisational success relies on your powers of persuasion.

My specialisation is showing you and your team how to ‘sell’ your product, services, project or ideas effectively... and quickly!

The Elephant

Is your place of work unpleasant, but no one really knows why? Perhaps you feel unable to speak your mind. Perhaps there is always poisonous gossip going around or you feel undermined by colleagues. Perhaps email exchanges have become guarded or passive-aggressive. Perhaps there is a general sense that everyone hates being at work. This is no way to run a successful business and this is no way to live a happy life.

You have an elephant. And it is my job to help you find it.

Every organisation has its elephant. For some it is simply the fabled ‘elephant in the room’ – that which everyone knows is there but which no one feels able to mention or confront. For others it’s the elephant of the old Eastern parable in which a group of blind men can’t agree on what an elephant is because they’re all feeling different parts of it.

Both these metaphors are useful to us because both are based on an essential dynamic found in human nature. Most often the dynamic is harmless and can be ignored, but in a business context – where team work and cooperation is vital to the running of the company, it can become toxic. The good news is that talking about our elephants can be a very positive thing – remotivating a group and reenergising interpersonal relationships between staff and departments.

It is not always easy to spot the symptoms, but usually when any group of people are asked to work together, sooner or later there’s an elephant tagging along. Almost any group suffers to some degree to the negative energies we all know exist: personal insecurity, professional jealousies, misunderstanding, competing ambitions or agendas pulling in opposite directions, and of course, plain-and-simple failure to communicate.

Often the problems that arise from this are a bit of both elephants. Sometimes people see the problem clear as daylight but don’t feel they have permission to bring it up or there isn’t a safe place to do so. In other cases, they’ve only felt part of the elephant and while their perception of it is valid, so is a colleagues competing perception. Problems – and elephants – can seem very different from different perspectives leading people to think they disagree when in fact they share the same concerns.

In my sessions, I work towards helping you find your elephant. Whether its trumpeting in the distance or is stampeding through the office, together we’ll track it down.