Wendy Rose

Types of coaching provided by Wendy

Career coaching: preparing for promotion, navigating significant step-ups in career, working towards retirement or redundancy, career reviews and becoming visible nationally.

Skills and Behavioural Coaching: building on existing leadership and management abilities and taking those to an advanced level.

Change Agent Coaching: supporting clients where there is a significant cultural and / or structural change agenda to be implemented.

Leadership coaching:  reflecting and understanding often paradoxical issues of personal style, power, legacy, vision, strategy and competing priorities while leading in an ambiguous and complex environment.

Personal Coaching: increasing resilience, personal effectiveness and wellbeing, reviewing work -life balance, personal fulfilment, existential meaning, life-purpose and self-expression.

Transformative Coaching: exploring at somatic, psychological, behavioural and energetic levels so that clients have some ‘quick wins’, and balance this with long term changes that are deeply integrated and sustainable. 

In effect these are ‘entry portals’ rather than different types of coaching and are often inextricably woven together; starting in one place and moving to another.

Professional background

I became interested in personal development after realising, in my late 20s, that I was more interested in people than things.  Following my first degree (History of Art) I worked in various museums and art galleries and then became the private curator for a billionaire art collector based in Switzerland.  Although interesting and exciting, shipping Picassos around the world was not fulfilling long term. I quit and volunteered in a drop-in centre for homeless people in the centre of London.  Many of the people had significant mental health issues. As I was not able to help to the extent that I thought was needed I started a five year training in psychotherapy.  After qualifying I ran a private practice for 10 years while also consulting in museum development.  As a result of that I became increasingly interested in how organisations change and did an MSc in organisational development to explore that further.  Since then I have had my own consultancy focussing on how people develop and thrive through their work; in effect blending the individual and the organisational.

Way of working

A number of things differentiate me from other coaches:

1. An unusual background of therapy, consulting and coaching means that I often work at the confluence of all three disciplines blending deep personal change, practical solutions, self-reflection, self-efficacy and pragmatism.

2. Extensive training and qualifications over many years has resulted in a large ‘tool-kit’ of approaches and frameworks from which to choose ways of working (eg psychodynamic, solutions focussed, somatic, transpersonal, systemic approaches) depending on the contract, the preferences of the client and the depth at which they want to work.  Within a programme of coaching we may therefore integrate a number of these; using a whiteboard for strategic planning, visual cards as metaphors for exploring or anchoring states of being, videoing a practice for a difficult forthcoming conversation, feedback from stakeholder interviews, insights from a psychometric, looking back to childhood to identify where a self limiting belief originates, using a well-chosen model or theory as a lens through which to find an explanation, or pausing for a relaxation, visualisation or meditation.   The case studies that I provide a link to below illustrate this multi-modal approach.

3. I work wholeheartedly with clients to achieve the outcomes they say they want; this involves commitment, time and energy from us both.  I like partnering with clients where the stakes are high, their appetite for sustainable change is significant and the organisation is willing to invest in high quality coaching to demonstrate the importance of the issue at stake and their commitment to that member of staff.

Coaching experience

I have been involved in personal and organisational change for over 20 years and have in excess of 3,000 hours of one to one coaching with individual clients.

With the HE sector I have worked with 20 universities.  The coaching is sometimes with one or two particular people (ie Imperial, Surrey, Coventry), sometimes it is to support a wider OD intervention (ie Coventry, Lincoln).  I have long standing (c. 8 years plus) relationships with Cambridge, LSE and Lincoln working with senior academic and professional service leaders at Departmental and SLT level.  I have been an associate at the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (now Advance HE) for 10 years.

Outside the HE sector, I am an associate at the Center for Creative Leadership (www.ccl.org), attached to their EMEA HQ in Brussels for nearly 20 years.  I work with senior and high potential leaders as part of residential in-house and open enrolment leadership development programmes.  Individual clients have come from over 40 countries and are usually working in FTSE 100, FTSE 250 and global brands, eg Unilever, Accenture, Barclays, Google, Xerox, BCG, Pepsico, John Lewis. 

Due to links I made earlier in my career I have a successful track record of partnering not for profit and third sector organisations to develop key personnel though coaching; eg Barbican Centre, Arts Council, English Heritage, O2 (Millenium Dome), NHS, local and national government and charities.

I worked with a science professor when they were Head of Department and feeling stuck: 

“I entered into coaching with a high degree of scepticism but it was a revelation; these sessions were terrific. By a combination of incredibly insightful questions, Wendy guided me to some very important discoveries about myself, about what I wanted from my career and how I should go about getting it.  Her subtle but penetrating approach worked brilliantly for me.”

Coaching qualifications and accreditations

APECS: Accredited coach (UK)

ICF:  Accredited Master Coach (Global)

I have two Diplomas in Coaching, an MSc in Change Agent Skills and Strategies, a postgraduate Diploma in Psychotherapy and Counselling and other qualifications in solutions focussed work, stress management, workplace mediation, counselling supervision and the transpersonal interpretation of dreams.

I am qualified to administer and interpret a number of psychometric instruments including MBTI Steps 1& 2, FIRO-B, Hogan, CSI, Workplace Big 5, Conflict Dynamics and various 360s.