DEVELOPMENT PAST ENGAGEMENTS
Various Local Councils across the UK
As part of her work Rachel has co-designed and developed training solutions around Resilience and delivers these sessions with councils in the South East of England. She has a huge amount of experience working with groups such as social workers, teachers and early years teams going through huge change as budgets are cut and service expectations increase.
Hilton Europe
Hilton Europe runs a wide variety of internal training and development events for its staff; from team leader to high potential development programmes. They wanted to provide additional development for Head of Departments and General Managers in two key competencies: People Management and Developing Relationships.
Rachel spent time with Hilton to gain an understanding of the roles and challenges. She then designed two complementary programmes to provide a coherent learning journey for people moving upwards through the Hilton management structure. The Head of Department programme focused on increasing awareness of individual differences, on influencing, and on interacting effectively with customers, peers and reports. The General Manager programme built on this awareness, with an increased focus on leadership and resilience.
The Head of Department workshop was delivered in April and November 2008 in Amsterdam and Paris respectively, using the Myers Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) and the MTRi tool, exploring team behaviours in MBTI terms. The Paris workshop was further developed, using feedback from the April session, to include Hay Group’s Influencing Styles tool, which explores applying an understanding of diversity, in persuasion and networking activities.
Both workshops used a highly interactive process, in which participants were expected to actively explore the application of their learning in day-to-day hotel management activities. The General Manager programme will be delivered following internal organisational changes and Rachel is currently completing coaching with two managers in Germany and South Africa who were unable to attend the training programmes.
Wiltshire County Council
Wiltshire County Council wanted to build a greater understanding of Emotional Intelligence to support the HR team in providing a highly effective service to the council and beyond. As part of their annual HR conference they were looking for a small introductory slot which would introduce the whole team to the concepts of EI in an engaging way.
Rachel designed a brief interactive and informative workshop which helped to simplify, and bring to life, the concepts of EI. As a result of this, Rachel then provided a half day workshop to help the HR team experience what EI looks and feels like.
She used practical exercises from the field of Neuro Linguistic Programming to encourage a team of 20 HR employees to explore empathy, self management, and self awareness in a fun and experiential way. They were then asked to consider how the things they had learned would impact upon the relationships that they managed on a day-to-day basis, and how they could use the techniques to improve these interactions. Much of the workshop was designed around group-work and interactive debate and all participants engaged well in the discussions and activities.
