Working with us

We believe all organisations need to thrive to be as successful as they can be.  We find that a business that isn’t thriving is less productive than it could be.  In such a business: 

• there are fewer clients and it is harder work acquiring them
• relationships with clients are not as effective, and therefore risk being not as productive, as they could be
• too few good people are attracted to work for it and, when they do join, they often leave
• There is room for improvement in the quality and amount of communication that takes place:
• between managers and staff
• within teams
• between managers
• and between people in the organisation and external stakeholders, including clients, suppliers, other businesses, and the wider community.

In short, there is insufficient useful and meaningful connection between people.

One could say that staff:

• are not as motivated as they could be
• and, in turn, are not motivating their peers, or are even actively demotivating them.
• Teams are not working together well. There is a wider lack of engagement and initiative
• In other words, the attitudes and behaviour of people are not aligned with the purpose and values of the business
• Indeed, people may not know what the purpose and values of the business are.

As a result of some, or all, of these factors (and others), people are not ‘pulling together’. 

They’re not focussed on what the business needs and conflict shows up as infighting, competition and game-playing which waste time, energy and resources.   There’s less evidence of engagement than there might be or ought to be.

Sometimes, everyone appears to be happy but they aren’t:  there are undercurrents of dissatisfaction which are not expressed, probably as a result of a belief that there would be no point in doing so.  

Leaders don’t seem to have success inspiring change or results.

Above all, the organisation needs to raise the amount and quality of leadership demonstrated by key people—and preferably by everyone—throughout the organisation. 

Because many of these symptoms are inter-related, an integrated approach is needed.  This will be delivered as a project made up of multiple interventions.  Tackling one symptom and leaving the rest unaddressed is likely to result in the business reverting to the status quo.  A successful project is likely to require a team of practitioners, each specialised in a different area, who are good at working with each other.

Our main areas of service delivery are:

1  Staff motivation and engagement
We need motivated people who are engaged to grow a successful business.  At PATK we use technology to benchmark engagement, identify successes, focus hotspots and develop an action plan to measurably improve morale, culture and retention.  Our technology partner is Engagement Multiplier, a survey-based software, who say:  ‘We provide a unique structure and framework for companies to systematically measure and improve employee engagement every 90 days.  Our technology enables growth-minded business leaders to harness the true power of their greatest asset—their employees—and build wonderful companies.  Over 90% of companies achieve Engaged Organisation Accreditation in less than a year’.

2  Coaching and training in behavioural styles
We use DISC.  It helps people in organisations better understand why they are like who they are and helps them easily identify other people’s traits and behaviours, enabling working relationships to be understood and managed more effectively. 

It maximises results, fostering more fun and the building of long-lasting, loyal, useful and interesting relationships where frustration is reduced and communication is more effective.  It is delivered as an on-line profile application.  We are big believers in integrating that tool with personal support/face to face delivery.

3  Coaching and training in emotional intelligence
This approach uses a small number of psychological models to help individuals gain insight into their actions, feelings and beliefs.  From there they can decide how to move forward:

‘A person stands in their own shadow and wonders why it is dark.’  (Zen proverb)

2 and 3 are complementary:  DISCsimple is primarily behavioural (but not exclusively) and eiw is primarily cognitive and emotional (but not exclusively).

Jointly and separately, these three areas of service delivery address:

• leadership
• teamwork
• business coaching
• staff engagement.

We lead by showing the way.  Our leadership approach creates a facilitating environment which fosters insight and understanding in our clients of whatever the issue(s) are that we have been engaged to help them address.

4 Teamship
In almost every organisation, almost every person is expected to be simultaneously both a leader and a follower. We believe that models of leadership and followership are useless id they aren’t consistent with each other, given that most people are expected to follow both at once. We go further and say that, in reality, they are largely the same thing: they answer the question, ‘how should I think, feel and act in order to maximise the success of others and the success of the enterprise?’ Of course there are some things specific to only leaders and others to only followers.
We lead by showing the way. Our leadership approach creates a facilitating environment which fosters insight and understanding in our clients of whatever the issue(s) are that we have been engaged to help them address.

Find out more…