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WESTMINSTER ASSOCIATES –
YEAR IN (RE)VIEW
As we move into the summer holidays, we at Westminster
Associates would like to take a moment to reflect on the year
to date and consider what’s in store for the rest of 2019, as so
many of you are no doubt doing.
During the first six months of 2019, Westminster Associates
has worked in 2 continents, 4 countries, 33 organisations
and with around 700 people - and we’ve loved every minute
of it. As with all of our jobs, it’s been hard work but it’s been
an absolute pleasure to see the ‘lightbulb moments’ for our
programme’s participants and the impact it’s had on their
self-awareness, team development and business performance.
So what exactly have we been up to?
Personal Development and Coaching
We’ve been working with people on the frontline of customer
interactions to help them better understand themselves, one
another and, most importantly, their customers.
We’ve also been partnering with the very inspirational Danny
Bourne (www.catalystdo.co.uk) who’s been coaching managers
so they can develop and lead high-performing teams, because
the more satisfied you and your team are with your work, the
more happy, committed, and productive you all are.
But what about when you just don’t connect with someone
and don’t understand why, no matter how hard you try? Our
approach is to not get tough on individuals but instead to
get tough on the problem through an equal balance of high
challenge and high support. We do this by encouraging
personal accountability coupled with the support needed to
achieve that. In larger organisations, this is often the starting
point for improving team effectiveness and creating great
leaders as well.
Team Development
There’s no magic or secret method in creating the best teams. It
takes conscious effort and self-awareness. But we don’t deal in
mysteries. We deal in reality and so we’ve been partnering with
our clients so that they can:
• Create a vision to lead everyone in the right direction
• Mobilise teams behind this vision
• Develop teams which have the confidence and
competence to succeed
• Enable teams to be the best possible version of themselves
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Leadership Effectiveness
Better leadership gets better results. We believe that great
leadership is the ability to adapt and connect with everyone in
the most effective way. Our work with leaders has been helping
our clients to:
• Develop a structure which explicitly communicates
expectations
• Engages employees so they not only deliver what’s
expected of them, but also deliver above and beyond that
• Create the right environment for everyone to exceed
targets
• Free managers up to focus on leading rather than getting
‘caught up in the weeds’
This is just a snapshot of what we’ve been doing and of what
we typically partner with our clients on, and is based on years
of experience. Our programmes are tailored to specific needs
and challenges, whether they be for a small enterprise, growing
business, or large corporation, or for individuals, team leaders,
senior executives or business owners.
But don’t take our word for it. Here’s what some of the
people we’ve worked with this year have to say:
“Paul ran an Insights Discovery session for RSA’s Corporate
Communications team in 2017, and a follow up session earlier
this year. Both sessions were enormously constructive. Paul
created a safe environment where we could have wide-ranging
conversations about how we interact and work as a team. I
think of Paul almost as a member of our wider team, so when
I needed someone to facilitate a thoughtful and sensitive
discussion about mental health in the workplace for a podcast
earlier this year, he was the obvious choice!”
Carmen Whitelock, Head of Group
Brand, Channels and Planning, RSA
Insurance Group
“Only a few months into our engagement with the team
at Westminster and there’s no looking back. In a vast and
crowded pot of leadership development options for businesses,
Westminster and the Insights programme stands out by a
mile. We’ve landed on not only a suite of development that
talks to the pace and creativity of our business, but a partner
in Paul, who truly gets us. We’re really excited by the gains we
know we’ll develop along the way. There’s no greater feeling
than seeing the physical change in an eye-roller, or seeing the