I’m an experienced facilitator and people professional bringing a strengths based approach to developing individuals and teams.
I use expertise and current evidence to underpin my work delivering this in a warm, approachable way that helps others feel comfortable and understood.
During my 30 year career I've worked in people roles across hospitality, retail, healthcare, membership bodies, charities and social businesses.
I’ve worked with organisations of all sizes - but I’m especially passionate about supporting charities and small employers that don’t have an in-house people team, or would like expert external support.
As well as being a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), I'm an accredited
TalentPredix™️ Strengths Practioner and and trained in Action Learning Facilitation.
I help teams to identify their individual and collective strengths, exploring how they can harness these to deliver social impact or commercial success.
I do this through:
I undertake TalentPredix strengths assessments with individuals using a self-assessment questionnaire, analysis of the results and a coaching debrief identifying key strengths, career motivators and values.
Helping professionals take the next steps in developing their career or self-employed business.
The challenge
I worked with a professional membership organisation whose board did not reflect the profile of its wider membership. While around 90% of members were women, only 12% of elected board members were female.
This created challenges around representation, visibility and governance. The organisation recognised that change was needed, but also wanted to approach the issue in a way that brought the existing board with them rather than leaving members feeling blamed or alienated.
My approach
I was asked by the Director to design and facilitate a session as part of the organisation’s Board Development Day, with the aim of helping the board understand the scale of the challenge and kick-start a longer-term strategy to address underrepresentation.
Working closely with the Scotland membership team, I analysed membership and board data to build a clearer picture of representation across the organisation. This highlighted not only the significant gender imbalance, but also disparities in age and the representation of people of colour.
Using this evidence, I designed an interactive workshop that created space for open and constructive discussion. The focus was on helping board members explore the data, understand why representation mattered and take collective ownership of the challenge, without alienating the people already around the table.
The impact
The workshop kickstarted a wider process of change, providing the board with a shared understanding of the challenge and a starting point for action.
From this, the organisation went on to develop a new board recruitment strategy, focusing on visibility, education and communication to encourage a broader range of members to consider board roles.
By 2025, 87% of the board was female, alongside increased representation from other previously underrepresented groups.
The workshop was one part of a much wider process, but it created the space for an important conversation, helped the board recognise and take ownership of the issue, and provided the impetus for the work that followed.
The challenge
I worked with a large support department within the NHS where sickness absence had reached 14% - significantly higher than the organisational average.
The team provided an essential service supporting clinical care across the organisation, so high absence levels were having an impact beyond the department itself, putting additional pressure on colleagues and affecting turnaround times.
Rather than treating absence as the problem in isolation, I wanted to understand what was behind the figures.
Understanding what was really happening
I arranged focus groups with supervisory staff to hear their experiences and understand the challenges they and their teams were facing.
These conversations uncovered a much broader picture. Many employees were balancing demanding jobs with significant pressures outside work, including caring responsibilities for children and older family members, financial pressures and their own health challenges.
These pressures were compounded by the nature of the work itself: physically demanding roles within a 24/7 service.
It became clear that simply focusing on sickness absence processes wasn't going to address the underlying issues. Supervisors needed greater confidence and a broader set of skills to support their people effectively while maintaining the needs of the service.
What I did
Using the insight from the focus groups, I developed a targeted programme of learning and support for the supervisory team.
Rather than concentrating solely on absence management procedures, the programme helped supervisors develop practical people-management skills, including:
The aim was to move away from ‘How do we manage sickness?’ to ‘How do we support people well, while enabling the team to still deliver?’
The impact
The results went beyond reducing absence. Sickness absence levels halved, enabling the department to provide more consistent support to clinical teams and improve turnaround times.
Just as importantly, subsequent staff survey results showed improved relationships and increased levels of trust between employees and the supervisory team.
By taking the time to understand what was really driving the problem and giving supervisors the confidence and skills to respond differently, the intervention strengthened both the employee experience and the performance of the service.
