Erskine Nash Associates Ltd

Erskine Nash Associates Ltd is perhaps best known for our highly engaging and practical leadership development, but that's only one aspect of what we do. Clients also value the way we design and facilitate 'Clarity & Alignment Workshops' - which help teams to gain a clearer, shared understanding of their goals for the year ahead and to align around the various plans in place to achieve those goals. A small team including me and Karolina Hayes (MCIPD), did exactly that with the lovely people at Parallax - perhaps one of the friendliest tech firms we work with in Leeds? Using the excellent venue at The Terrace to bring the whole team together, we created a workshop which aimed to do serious business while also keeping energy and momentum high. We also ran a session introducing the behavioural profiles created by C-me which have landed so well with many of the Parallax team over the last year. Clarity and alignment are vital components of team performance - but they don't just happen by accident. Many thanks to Andy Fitch and Jo Dutton for their support in making it all happen.

Personal Leadership in Tech Consulting ('PLITECH') is the new programme commissioned by one of our favourite clients in Leeds - Hippo. As organisations grow in success and scale (something Hippo know a lot about), many things need to change - including leadership practice and culture. You simply can't lead an organisation of 500 people the way to did when there were 5, 15 or 50 of you. In many roles, especially in consulting, your technical skills are not enough. The ability to work with clients, colleagues and partner organisations becomes more important - especially as you move into leadership roles but arguable before that too. The irony is that we may have developed our technical skills over many years but we rarely allocate nearly as much time to developing our people skills. This is where programmes such as PLITECH can help. Recognising that a single day's training is not enough to achieve sustainable change, Helen Croft at Hippo asked us to build in 1-1 support both before and after the workshop to help delegates apply the learning back at work. The Erskine Nash Associates Ltd approach is always practical and engaging - on this occasion we used the great kits from MTa Learning as shown in the image. Alongside co-tutor Andrew Stanley, we combined practical activity and serious learning.

Great to be back at the Business School at King's College London to run a short programme of Practitioner Seminars for students studying for a Masters in Human Resource Management and Organisational Analysis at King's College London Business School. The Erskine Nash Associates Ltd approach is always practical and engaging which the students seem to appreciate and it's refreshing to hear their perspectives on the role of the People function in organisations. As always, old friend (and former ENA team member) Steve Bryan was there to bring his years of experience as a Director of People and Change. In an interesting twist of fate, ENA recently welcomed Karolina Hayes (MCIPD) to the team. We first met Karolina 12 or 13 years ago(!) at Kings College on this very Masters programme. Since then she has forged a highly successful career helping several tech firms scale up, and has become a highly qualified, experienced, facilitator and coach - thus making her an idea member of our team. Karolina has already worked with some of our tech clients in Leeds and we have a busy month ahead!

Great to be back with the tech community in Leeds again - pretty much my second home these days. Alongside Andrew Stanley, we were working with the highly talented team at Parallax. It's fair to say that Erskine Nash Associates Ltd are probably best known for our highly practical leadership development programmes but we also spend a lot of time designing and running team events too. Andy Fitch asked us to help engage and align the Parallax team around their plan for 2024 - so we ran one of our Clarity & Alignment Workshops. This ensures that a team have a common understanding of the target outcomes (clarity) and also discuss and co-ordinate ideas, plans and activities (to create greater alignment). Doing this collectively, in a practical and engaging way also brings extra benefits such as improved working relationships. Of course, it wouldn't be an Erskine Nash event unless there was also an intriguing, team-based problem solving project to bring the concepts to life. The Parallax team's intellectual horsepower was on show and they delivered Project Pilots' Dilemma in record time - very impressive!