Executive Coaching Client Comments

February 2008
“The coaching course provided by Nicola Bunting is first class; the programme is well structured and highly effective. I personally found that the investment in resource, time and funding delivered excellent results from both a professional and personal perspective. The programme enables the client to have a personally restructured foundation that results in significantly improved performance, notably in the areas of envisioning, communication and empowerment”
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Lorraine Bailey
Global Market Strategy & Planning Project Management Leader

January 2008
"Nicola became my coach in 2005. Working with her has been a delight and an inspiration and she has made a truly remarkable and profound impact on my professional and personal life.

I have always considered myself to be open and receptive with a high degree of personal awareness, and yet Nicola has helped me to take this to a greater level, impacting positively on my relationships, achievement of goals both in and out of work, self confidence, resilience and personal success.

I am hugely impressed with Nicola's personal style of unconditional support and commitment, alongside her refreshing honesty. She utlilises an array of great tools which have helped me to explore my personal style, motives, values, strengths and life balance helping me to recognise my challenges, opportunities, sticking points and most importantly my true potential.

Coaching is a fabulous journey of self discovery, which is sometimes personally challenging and extremely rewarding and my work with Nicola has made that journey positively life changing for me.

Nicola uses the Enneagram as a personality analysis tool for insight and change. It is one of the best tools I have encountered, helping me to make sense of my personality, thinking and behaviour and also to understand and appreciate how others work too. Using the Enneagram was a real Ah ha! moment for me and the messages and insights from that work resonate with me on a day to day basis. In a very practical sense it did what no other personality tool does and has supported me in recognising the things that I can do that optimise my strengths and to understand what helps to keep me balanced, grounded and focused. People in my personal and professional life have seen a difference in my approach, my positivity and my approach to life and work.

In my role as Management Development Director for First Rail (12000 employees) one of my key accountabilities is to ensure the talent management and capability development of the executive and senior management group across the Rail Division, which comprises 6 individual businesses. As a result of individual coaching with Nicola, I recommended and subsequently engaged her as the executive coach for key members of our executive team. Their feedback and results were impressive, with the added benefit of an appreciation of each other's strengths, discussing areas where we asked for support from each other, along with the development of a common language amongst us, which was simple, insightful and provided a way of contracting and guiding our behaviour. This I believe was derived from our individual experiences with Nicola, aligned with the use of the tools and methodologies she uses in the coaching process.

Each of us having Nicola as our coach to confidentially support our own personal journey and needs, provided a powerful bond and a common platform in a very unique way that proved to be a great advantage and strength for the team. "

Bernie Price
Management Development Director First Rail

January 2008
"Dear Nicola,

I wanted to express my appreciation for all your input in helping me to gain enhanced performances from my management team. Quite often, hard working and well meaning managers are not as effective as their efforts lead them to believe. Utilizing your approach, made all of us reflect on what elements of our working practices were working well, and those that could be improved upon, making sure that this aligned with the goals that we agreed and set out to achieve.
I found that eeting once a month as a group, kept the emphasis on progress, constant. What I also found particularly advantagous with this format, was that we were able to discuss and tackle work reated issues in real time, which allowed us to execute the most appropriate responses. I found the mix of group sessions, and one to one sessions particulary fruitful in helping me to understand the strengths and weaknesses of my team, and also their boundaries, as I am sure they found mine.

Undoubtedly, a great side effect of our coaching was that we became closer as a team. We now deal with issues more quickly, getting to the bottom line of the issue without being sidetracked by the trap door of personal interpretation, getting in the way. We have a greater understanding of how we all like to work and what motivates us. Focusing and building on our strengths, has enabled us to apply the most suitable person in the team to a given task, whereas before perhaps the least suitable person would have struggled on regardless. I would encourage anyone who embarks on this path to conduct the initial steps as quickly as possible, I say this because the true understanding of how effective the course can be came mid way through our sessions which lasted a year.
Finally, may I wish you and your team my very best wishes for the future, and I look forward to working together again.
Thank you for all your help and assistance."

Mark Peate
UK Sales Director

February 2008
"I began my coaching sessions with Nicola Bunting with the goal of significantly improving my work life balance. From a professional perspective, I had enjoyed ongoing and consistent success, progressing through the finance function at two Fortune 50 companies. Despite verbally stating that family was my number 1 priority, I had allowed my work life to actually lead my day to day life over many years. While I was aware of the issue, I was unable to address it effectively prior to my coaching work with Nicola. I was painfully unaware of who I really was, and what my strengths and weaknesses were. In fact, I believe subconsciously I invested a significant amount on time trying to remedy my weaknesses versus strengthening my strengths…taking time away from my family.

My coaching with Nicola forced me to slow down and to be introspective for the first time, investing time in me. In doing so, it became clear that my nurturing nature was the key impediment to my lack of work life balance. I always wanted to do the right thing and could not say no to people at work. Nicola helped me to attack this head on. I first spent time ensuring that I addressed all things that drained my energy. I also invested time to truly understand my strengths and worked with Nicola on how to leverage those strengths to drive even greater performance at work, enabling me to spend more time with my family. Nicola helped me to clarify my short and long term goals, to address issues that could impede my ability to deliver on these goals and to leverage my strengths to perform at my peak performance. I am happy to say that today, I have both good work life balance and continue to succeed professionally. I utilize the tools that I have learned via my coaching with Nicola everyday. I am much more productive at work, a better coach to my organization and more involved with my family everyday. I live a much richer and fulfilled life."

Director, Proctor & Gamble

"When I was going through a challenging time in my new role at work, a colleague of mine recommended Nicola to me as Nicola has significantly increased her personal effectiveness, impact, and enjoyment of her work. Not only have I now worked successfully with Nicola, I have also recommended her to 2 colleagues and a friend who is the Managing Director for Europe of a major media company. Nicola has helped them to get a better sense of perspective - helping one of them to open her eyes and mind to investigate a whole new landscape, they seem much more content, more secure, and they are achieving a dramatically improved work-life balance. For another one, Nicola has helped him re-negotiate his contract with his company, which is usually a big area of uncertainty for him, helping him go through different scenarios. This resulted in him being calm and collected during the negotiations vs. being anxious as he has been in the past, achieving a better result. As one of them said to me, "Nicola holds your hand through the journey and tells you how it is in her honest and sincere way".

Getting coaching from Nicola is helping me to fulfil my potential, to be the best I can be. All of us have immense talents, and Nicola helps you leverage them and overcome obstacles to reach your goals. Nicola has gotten me to determine what my goals are and we continuously work on achieving them. By focusing on my strengths and building on them, I have improved not only my performance at work, I have also achieved a great sense of accomplishment and deeper satisfaction. Nicola's coaching helps you get immediate results on a lot of your day-to-day issues at work and continuously works with you on things that may need a longer time to resolve. We have worked on ensuring that my needs are met by setting boundaries. She keeps you focused on your goals and helps you achieve them while always staying true to yourself. We also tackle personal issues as a harmonious personal life increases your effectiveness in the workplace. Having somebody who c! continuously encourages you and helps you deal with your issues in a positive and constructive way is extremely motivating and even more so when you can see the positive results. Nicola has helped me to become more confident and positive, achieve extremely strong results in terms of the business and developing my team, and is helping me achieve my goals. I have a better work-life balance, am more fulfilled and happier, and make those around me more fulfilled.

Nicola has these amazing strengths which enable you to achieve outstanding results. Not only does she have empathy, is understanding, patient, warm, and inspiring, she is also honest, perceptive, gets to the core of the issues, challenges you, and is results-oriented. Nicola enables you to get you to a higher level of energy which is one of the major pillars to get you to meeting your goals. She helps you to deeper self-awareness which enables you to stretch yourself to your full potential. Nicola has really enriched my life!"

Sabine

Associate Director, Procter & Gamble

"I wanted to thank you for all your insightful and perceptive guidance during the course of our coaching sessions. I have found the last 6 sessions particularly useful. It has made me realise that although I thought I had already learnt the majority of lessons I had to learn, in fact it was definitely worth persevering.  In terms of what effect it has had on me, I thought you might find it useful to have a specific record, in case this is useful to other clients. You can then use this in addition to the reference I wrote last Summer.

On average, when I compare my performance at work vs. a year ago, I would estimate that I am about 30% more effective. Of course it is very difficult to put a number to it: but I simply notice that I simply have more time available in order to address other more fundamental and strategic tasks, that I previously could not tackle - either because I had no time, or because I had not sufficient distance to my work to realise the opportunities and challenges it still posed. I think this tracks back to three specific changes in behaviour:

1) I have completely cut out procrastination. When I receive a request for work that makes me feel uneasy: I ask myself why I feel that way, and challenge myself to think what would it take to do the task well. Typically, I find that either I can do the task alone: if I simply address the challenge objectively rather than worry about it, or I need to set up someone to help with it. I then schedule this meeting and complete the task without any negative pondering about whether I can do it or not. It sounds horribly simple, but on balance I think this saves me many hours per week. Once I have decided to "park" something till the session allocated to it (with the person around to help), I simply do not worry about it till then, which in turn frees myself up for the other tasks which I do with unfettered enthusiasm.

2) I have more trust in the quality of my own work: which makes me more creative and willing to take risks. I go into projects with the mindset that my proposals are strong: this means I present them with greater confidence, and am more secure in receiving feedback to build them further. I simply feel a lot less threatened, which means the whole team works smoother: we give and receive feedback in an atmosphere of productive idea building.
This has a knock on effect on how I judge the work of my team. Whereas before, I was always tempted to be ameliorative and try to build on ideas (even if they were not good enough to form a basis for this) now, on the very odd occasion that the work really is not up to scratch, I have no hesitation in saying so. Because I know my team know their good work is valued and praised, they can take the criticism much more maturely. Result is a better product all round: and everyone gains: After all, it does not serve any of us well to allow less than 100% good work to go forward....In addition, this behaviour helps me steadfastly defend even very unpopular opinions if I am convinced they are right, since I no longer believe that others will lose regard for me if I disagree with them.

3) I have much more energy, as a result of being happier and fitter. This extra time I use to do pieces of work which are more strategic and visionary. I actually have time to not just think "how do I do the task", but instead, how can I make this complete project outstanding. I often use your technique of asking in a positive sense" What would it take?". In private terms, I have thought "what would it take" to feel like a good Mum as well as a leader: the answer is a flexible work schedule built around specific behaviour eg. minimum of 2 school drop offs a week. Now I have decided this, I keep to it. I no longer spend time worrying "am I being a good Mum", and so when I am at work, I am truly at work. And when I am at home, I relax, knowing I have done a good job.

The result of all this is that in some ways, I have developed a laser beam focus on what I need to do. On the other hand, I am simply more relaxed and happy, so can get the work done without radiating massive intensity and tension which makes those around me feel uneasy. My colleagues have noticed the difference too. Firstly, I look different and more impactful, by dressing better, and therefore feeling more in tune with my sartorially demanding job! Secondly, I am more open to others input: and this means that other people around me work with greater ease and creativity: they know they will not be blamed if things go wrong, and their ideas are genuinely valued. Thirdly, my colleagues say I am very professional in my approach, and that they learn a lot from me. I am convinced that the corporate world operates under the assumption that great internal competition is needed for efficiency: and if some people "win" then others must "lose". I now completely reject this approach: in the long term, the vast majority of my business interactions can be turned into win/win situations if they are only thought of with sufficient clarity, insight, and - absolutely critically - the element of personal insecurity can be left aside.

If you use this statement with any other clients, I would appreciate it if you could keep it anonymous. Should anyone want the reference checked to see it is genuine, I am happy to contact them to confirm it..

Looking forward to the next cycle when a new fiscal year hits...  K"

"I have worked with Nicola for the past year and have the highest professional and personal regard for her.

"She has been an extremely effective executive coach, both in small groups and with individuals. She has a wide breadth of expertise, covering the whole range of topics related to executive coaching: particularly personal impact and effectiveness. She also has shrewd personal insight, and an unthreatening approach: this makes her able to work with all levels of people in an effective and non judgmental fashion. We have found her focus and knowledge in the following areas of great value: communication skills (particularly verbal), team-working, personality typing and strength analysis, and time management. Importantly, she can work with very senior individuals, as well as those who are more junior in the organization, adapting her style accordingly.

"The particular areas where she helped our design team were in the personal impact area. This spanned from understanding physical impact: ranging from personal dress sense and style, to presentational techniques and voice range. She then moved on to helping individuals understand their own personal values and skill set, and how that equipped them for their current or desired roles. She helped my team to understand both themselves and myself better as a manager: this has significantly improved the way we have worked together. For example, she has greatly increased the confidence of my direct reports: they are more self assured, and aware of their own personal strengths. This has enabled them to be promoted to more responsible jobs which meet their skills better.

"I have no hesitation in recommending Nicola further for both individual and group work. My personal experience, and that of my colleagues, has been that coaching sessions with her significantly increased our personal effectiveness, impact, and enjoyment in our work. These changes have been noticed by our own management, and we are definitely planning to have further sessions with her in the upcoming fiscal year. My initial response to having a life coach was extremely sceptical. However, after 12 months personal experience, I can only emphasize how worthwhile our team have found Nicola's input. She provides an objective, unbiased sounding board to work through personal and life decisions, puts them into the work context, and helps the individual therefore take personal control of their work productivity in a very healthy fashion."

Kathryn
Associate Director, Procter & Gamble