Sue is a highly skilled inspirational leader and strategist with significant expertise in leading and implementing change in a wide range of political and complex organisations. Sue specialises in facilitating inspirational leadership development that unleashes leadership potential, building a culture of creativity, collaboration and high performance. Sue passionately believes that effective leaders do not demand authority, but are granted it and lead through influence, not power.
Her focus is constantly on developing people skills. She has the ability to harness the differences in individuals and teams, and has an underlying optimism that even opponents can discover shared values. Emotional Intelligence is figural in her facilitation and intervention work ensuring personal and professional growth and learning for all individuals. Sue develops leadership development programmes that encourage leadership to percolate throughout the organisation she is contracted with, ensuring every manager has the skill and desire to emotionally connect its’ people to the results the organisation needs to achieve.
She is an excellent relationship builder, creative and passionate about ensuring constant improvement and has the ability to inspire people she works with to do the same. She has a skill for asking incisive questions and uses creative challenging approaches designed to stimulate thinking and stretch delegates beyond their comfort zones.
Sue’s expertise lies in supporting leaders through cultural and organisational change. She supports and challenges them to make sense of how they need to operate differently whilst maintaining the momentum of the business alongside planning for both the ‘interactional’ and the intellectual challenges.
In order that a client focused solution is produced Sue is emphatic about undertaking a culture audit and diagnostic approach for her contracting clients ensuring involvement of a wide representation from within the organisation.
Sue has expertise in supporting individuals through the transition from experienced manager to a strategic transformational role through using coaching techniques that focus on the individual’s development to achieve maximum impact in their new role.
Practices
Sue has a strong track record of leading and delivering strategic initiatives, managing change and brokering collaborative working relationships across organisational boundaries. Her professional expertise was gained from working within highly political environments, managing complex relationships and projects, breaking down the ‘silo’ mentality and developing collaborative approaches to solution focused work.
Sue has led on a number of interventions for poor performing organisations, producing improvement plans and ensuring full execution was achieved within timescale and resource limitations. She specifically focused on building and sustaining consensus around a long term vision and identifying short term actions for immediate impact.
Sue places a great emphasis on enhancing customer focused services; a regular strategy was to strongly encourage directors and senior staff to experience life at the customer service level and practically learn about the business and utilise that learning for enhanced improvement of services.
Establishing a learning culture in all organisations she worked in was a key achievement, exploring how learning could bring about continuous improvement which permeated through all levels of the organisation. This changed the way employees worked and communicated, it included: leadership development with an emphasis on visible leadership; a culture change that established creative ways of tackling new challenges and a focus on solutions; and implementing an agreed robust performance management strategy.
She has always had antennae for the social climate and responsibility in which her organisations existed, ensuring that the divisions and departments were looking upwards rather than just sideways. She places a strong emphasis on developing leaders who understand the value of networks and stakeholders that extend far beyond the traditional confines of their main focus. This approach ensures that opportunities can be increased, threats are identified quickly and immediate solutions sought.
Professional Background
Sue’s original background was Education and has spent the last 14 years working in different public sector organisations as a Strategic Director leading change and improvement strategies. She holds a Masters Degree in Leadership and Management.
She has been an independent consultant for 2 years working with different public sector organisations on leadership development programmes and coaching clients in the private sector.
Current professional development includes completion of Coaching for Organisation Consultants at Ashridge and is currently working towards accreditation.
Personal Interests
Sue likes to set herself new challenges and is currently learning to play the saxophone. She loves doing anything practical and still has an unfulfilled ambition to project manage an eco self build house.