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Corporate Consulting.
With over 20 years combined experience in Corporate Consulting, Awaken specialise in providing tailor made solutions for your business needs, whether in training, coaching, change management, facilitation, mentoring, or recruitment and selection.
We have worked with a variety of organisations and have an established portfolio of clients in the public and commercial sectors.
Lisa Wake has successfully developed the business to include a team of Associate Consultants, offering training, coaching and development services to companies as diverse as Northern Foods Group, Bayer Cropscience, Mundipharma, Tubelines, Microsoft, BASF, Napp Pharmaceuticals, Keepmoat, Telford and Wrekin Council, Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Trust.
Our most significant project in the commercial sector is to work as management development consultants and advisors to Northern Foods Group since 2000. We have assisted the organisation to manage a changing agenda within the Northern Foods Group and to increase their market share of quality products. Within the public sector, we have worked closely with the NHS Modernisation Agency in implementing the national Clinical Governance Framework for medical and pharmacy contracts and have worked with a number of Local Authorities and NHS Organisations in the delivery of bespoke training and development programmes.
Sample Programmes:
1) Leadership & Development Programme.
A programme linked to the Organisational Competency Framework.
The purpose of the programme was to develop high potential managers who could successfully lead the business in the future. The programme encouraged individuals to realise their potential and those of their teams to deliver the business strategy.
We worked closely with the HR and training department to develop a modular programme that was delivered by a professional team of internal and external facilitators, all of whom were specialists in the latest theory and techniques within their field. Each module of the programme had a clear link to the business strategy and Management Competencies, helping to reaffirm key messages and deliver the organisation’s distinctive competency.
The outcomes of the programme were:
- To use individual knowledge and skills to drive the business forward
- To develop awareness of and use appropriately, a range of skills to enhance individual performance and that of others to deliver the bottom line
- Develop confidence in using personal skills to challenge and take responsibility
- To become aware of the importance of teamwork in the delivery of business objectives
- To realise the importance of cross-functional working, make decisions and take actions that were of a company perspective, rather than a functional perspective
- To create opportunities for the individual and the team to realise greater potential
- Supporting self and others by motivating, influencing and communicating effectively
We worked closely with the organisation to ensure that the programme was staffed through internal and external resources and individual leadership potential was identified within the organisation, and accessed into the programme. Managers were asked to nominate individuals to attend the programme and a set of criteria was developed to enable selection of individuals. Each successful candidate for the programme was assigned a workplace mentor and a project sponsor, ensuring that the line manager, mentor and project sponsor supported the individual to get the most out of the programme.
The programme ran for a period of two years, with a total of 30 managers attending. Of these participants, many went on to achieve promotions and a number of the projects demonstrated substantial business success, including refining manufacturing processes, developing stronger working relationships with key customer accounts, re-branding of a product to enable a higher visibility within the market place and an resultant increase in sales.
Mentoring Programme.
We were contracted to develop a mentoring framework that met the learning needs of the organisation, including key performance areas, and strategic objectives. This process included the training, development and selection of mentors. Subsequent to this a further programme was developed that trained key influencers in the organisation to NLP Practitioner level status.
The aims of the mentoring programme were to develop capable and valued performance mentors who could help deliver the values of the organisation through the development of its people through a process of structured training and inter module tasking that:
- Enabled an in-depth understanding of the role of a mentor and how this would add to the success of the organisation
- Recognised the importance of outcomes in the mentoring relationship and how to facilitate mentees towards an outcome frame
- Developed rapport skills including verbal and non-verbal cues to rapport
- Outlined the key principles of mentoring within a logical framework and when mentoring is required at value and belief level, and when new behaviours or competencies are required of the individual
- Considered flexible mentoring styles to meet individual needs and how to incorporate mentoring into the current systems for people development, such as succession planning, appraisal systems and management training
- Facilitated the ability to recognise and utilise different motivational triggers through the use of influencing language
- Enabled performance excellence through the use of positive language
- Developed a greater understanding of self within the mentoring role to inform individual personal and professional development
- Recognised that the development of employees is crucial to the ongoing success of the organisation
The programme commenced with the development of a framework for selection of work based mentors and we worked with the company to agree the selection criteria. The organisation was keen to use pre-existing processes, therefore selection criteria utilised OPQ and Insights profiles of managers.
Selected mentors were then invited to attend a 2 day workshop that developed core competencies, and then a further review workshop after a period of 6-8 weeks that enabled the opportunity to review the integration of skills and provide mini-workshops to update skills further.
A total of 5 workshops and 54 mentors were trained across 13 business units over a 6 month period. This resulted in the pairing of 69 mentoring relationships within the business, with some mentors being assigned more than one mentee.
The project was evaluated using two benchmarking tools, a subjective tool that measured changes over time against learning outcomes, and the Firo-B mentoring scale, a graded tool that considered changes in competence specific scores over time.
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