Here are a couple of challenges that I helped clients deal with:

• Moving the Department
  I arrived for a coaching session with a senior manager for IT services at a chemical company near Frankfurt. As his assistant showed me in, he said: “a couple of things have changed since we spoke a couple of days ago. First, we’ve been taken over by locusts. Secondly, I have to move my operation over 200 km to a less attractive location, with no interruption in service.” Here is how it turned out.
• The Stalled Project
  At the end of a consulting contract, a client told me about his new challenge: to roll out a European-developed SAP system across the organisation’s US sites. He brushed off my suggestion of some training to prepare the European staff for working in the States with, “you’re probably right, but we don’t have the budget for that sort of thing.” Six weeks later the project kicked-off. Six months later, my phone rang: “Can you come to the East Coast next week?” Here is how it turned out.

 

Here’s what some clients say about working with me:

He helped me with the tools, but much more importantly I now understand that these issues around time management were just symptoms pointing to some deeper challenges. Meeting these has brought a big shift in my leadership. I now understand that power is no longer a burden, but much more a lever to give me the freedom I need to do the research I want to. In addition, I now have pragmatic tools that help me to delegate and to help my people to learn how to solve their own problems.
His approach to get me to observe and collect data about my own behaviour and thoughts has been invaluable. Getting used to viewing issues from a new perspective opened up new solutions quickly. The coaching also helped me to calm down and to complete project proposals on time without burning the midnight oil – at least most of the time.
When we started working together, I was wondering when I’d be able to fill a professor’s shoes. Over four months I grew to fill those shoes out nicely.
If you’re only interested in acquiring a few tools, read a book or visit a seminar. If you’d like to find out more about yourself and how that impacts your leadership, get a Coach.

Prof. Katja Schmitz
Clemens Schöpf Institute
TU Darmstadt

Great thanks for a great EMBO Lab Management Course (Ware, April 2011)! It’s already been a while since the course ended, so I’ve had a lot of time to see for myself how much I’ve learned from you. The things that you taught me have been very helpful in the running of my lab, recruiting new staff and so on. These were four most productive days of my life! I can’t thank you enough for that.

Dr. Tomasz Wilanowski
Group Leader, Laboratory of Signal Transduction
Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Sciences

If you would like to share your experience of working with me, please contact me here.