One of our consultants has recently worked with M, a regional manager with responsibility for a number of sites in the UK. Three meetings have taken place, each of about 2 hours, over a 4 month period.

At the first meeting time was spent getting to know each other – ensuring that M felt comfortable with his consultant. Having established some rapport he was encouraged to talk about what he wanted from the sessions. It emerged that M felt he needed to raise his profile within his organisation, having been with the company for some time, he was concerned that people were not taking him seriously in the more senior role he now plays.

We then explored what exactly M meant by having a higher profile and what that would be like in practice.
Having established something to aim for we then talked about the people and situations where he felt he needed to be seen differently.
As a result of this, we settled on a plan of action for the regular senior managers meeting, where he felt there was an opportunity to influence his boss and peers, and in doing so start to change people’s perception of him.

At the second meeting the focus was on what had happened at the meeting. M had not done what he had intended to do, because he recognised the meeting to be a more “dangerous” environment than he had realised.
On the face of it a disappointing outcome but, when the meeting was explored in more detail, significant learning was available.
Rather than just backing off from his original plan M had used the signal of “danger” as a prompt to evaluate the meeting, it’s culture and it’s effectiveness.

As the result of this exploration of M’s options for increasing his profile and value to his boss, an opportunity to positively influence the culture and ultimately the effectiveness of the senior managers meeting emerged.
This then turned into an action plan which M implemented with very positive results.
The third meeting initially focused on exploration of the factors which had enabled him to be successful and how to build on that success.
The final segment of that meeting focused on a new target – the development of M’s team of site managers. Intentions were established which will be reviewed at the next meeting.