People Zone Limited
UK/worldwide
Contact:
+447954361889
Social:
Services:
- In-house Leadership Development Programme
- Facilitation of team-building processes
- Facilitation of participatory events relating to any topic/sector: Strategic Planning and Visioning; Dynamic Project Planning, programme review, evaluation and learning
- Leadership coaching
Testimonials:
“Lesley and PeopleZone are great to collaborate with - always enthusiastic, energetic and creative, you know you are working with a great partner. Highly recommended for leadership and team development work where her facilitation skills and use of applied improvisation exercises have helped us create a really engaging and powerful leadership development journey for our clients. Huge amounts of experience in the voluntary and international development sectors in particular.”
John Tierney, Transform Management Ltd
“With Lesley’s guidance before, during and after the workshop, she supported the process to be creative, engaging and challenging for all those who participated, and guided us to clearly defining the issues which face us and the steps we can take to overcome them. She did an excellent job of guiding us through some tricky conversations and making sure everyone’s views and comments were taken into account.”
Debbie Ball, International Alert (formerly CAFOD Zimbabwe)
About:
When it comes to responding to the humanitarian impact of global disasters everything is urgent - lives need to be saved, vulnerable people protected, communities provided with food, water, healthcare and sanitation - the focus tends to be on ‘what we are doing’ but not so much the 'how’.
My 20 years’ experience of this sector – work with governments, NGOs, donors and community organizations – means I understand the reality: yes, the work is challenging, yet extremely fulfilling, with people motivated to work extremely hard because there are always unmet needs. But it’s the working environment that occupies my attention now. High staff turnover and burnout is considered an unavoidable fact, the focus is "task" rather than "people", and team dysfunction and negative working culture is often ignored. Organization development initiatives (such as leadership training, team-building, promotion of coaching) don’t generally feature in disaster managers' training.
Senior Managers face multiple challenges - an insecure country context, ambitious targets, limited support from a distant and over-loaded HQ - and a leadership culture based on a centralised hierarchy.
But it doesn’t have to be like that: I work with Senior Managers to build high-performing leadership teams which are able to confidently tackle weaknesses, drive change, deliver results and build sustainable growth.
Applied Improvisation is a core element of this work – AI games and exercises give hardworking and senior professionals “permission” to relax, laugh, play – and this means they relate to each other in completely different ways, discover things they have in common with their colleagues, and begin to empathise and engage with people they have had tense relationships with, and have avoided. Improvisation, combined with facilitation skills to foster participation, learning and engagement, and a structure which achieves the organization’s objectives for the meeting – makes for a powerful, high-impact and, (yes, importantly) fun intervention.