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Coaching for Excellence

Developing new perspectives and solutions. Advance HE offers a dedicated one-to-one executive coaching service with a pool of highly skilled and diverse coaches from across the UK.

One-to-One Executive Coaching

The challenges facing higher education are complex and demanding. Leaders at all levels need access to support and development that allows them to reflect and build on their current practices. With increasing pressures including financial pressures and the need to be agile, we have witnessed the power of coaching to support leaders to deliver critical projects, to manage teams, and to define and deliver strategic outcomes. One-to-one coaching also remains a core component of many of our leadership development programmes.

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Our coaching services

Advance HE offers a dedicated one-to-one executive coaching service with a pool of highly skilled and diverse coaches from across the UK.

Leaders increasingly require an informed yet curious mind-set, to be both focused and action-driven, yet intentionally reflective. We recognise the need for leadership which encompasses and speaks to the complexity of individual and intersectional experiences that includes a diversity of characteristics, all within the specific context of HE.

Our coaching can be tailored to your needs and that of your institution and can include the following types:

  • Executive coaching
  • Established leader coaching
  • Technical expert to people leader
  • Senior leader coaching
  • Transitions leadership coaching
  • Coaching to embed leadership programme learning

Coaching benefits

Coaching provides a confidential thinking space, an opportunity to create a personal and professional vision and a route to achieving it, an opportunity to understand and positively disrupt unhelpful patterns of thinking and behaviour, and the benefit of the safety and rigour of working with our professionally trained coaches. 

Through a variety of approaches and techniques, our coaches will facilitate you in finding your own solutions to problems and challenges related to your role in the organisation rather than simply providing answers.

Coaching can help you in:

  • Developing strategic thinking
  • Managing difficult relationships and situations
  • Articulating a vision 
  • Managing people
  • Developing personal effectiveness  
  • Influencing with impact
  • Achieving balance and integration of work and life
  • Developing personal resilience
  • Building self-confidence and working through imposter phenomena
  • Managing career transitions  
  • Building leadership confidence and authority 
  • Managing upwards
  • Working through organisational politics 
  • Moving from middle to senior management.

The impact of coaching

Offering coaching support made staff feel valued, and delivered a number of tangible and intangible benefits including direct increases in self-confidence/efficacy/awareness/cognition/insight and sustained behaviour changes which may indirectly improve leadership skills, skills development or job performance. Further intangible benefits, included people describing coaching as an opportunity to reflect on strengths, to feel empowered, and in a positive way, to provide a personally challenging experience for the coachee.

2018 survey on the impact of coaching conducted by The Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (now Advance HE)

Exploring the Impact of Coaching in Higher Education

The growing use of coaching to support the development of staff in universities requires a significant investment of time and money, and yet the practice of evaluating the impact of that investment appears to be spasmodic. Higher education does not appear to have fully explored the value of coaching or the tools to evaluate it. Through this stimulus paper, the authors Harding, Sofianos and Box aim to fill that gap. They begin by presenting a snapshot of the ways in which coaching is used, valued and evaluated in higher education and have used these findings to develop a series of provocations to provide thought leadership and debate within the sector, specifically on how coaching is evaluated.

Exploring the Impact of Coaching in Higher Education
21/02/2018
Exploring the Impact of Coaching in Higher Education View Document

Additional resources summarising the impact and outcomes of executive coaching can be found in Erik de Haan’s 2021 book, What Works in Executive Coaching – Understanding Outcomes Through Quantitative Research and Practice-Based Evidence and his 2019 book, Critical Moments in Executive Coaching: Understanding the Coaching Process through Research and Evidence-Based Theory.

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Coach profiles

Below is a selection of Advance HE coach profiles. 

Dr Jeremy Hinks

Coach
,
Advance HE
Dr Jeremy Hinks
Dr Jeremy Hinks brings decades of coaching experience from his 36-year professional career. Before founding his independent coaching practice, Alpamayo Coaching Ltd, in 2016, Jeremy spent 13 years in pharmaceutical research. This was followed by 23 years at the University of Southampton, including 17 years in the School of Chemistry, where he held various school and university leadership positions.

Jenny Garrett OBE

Leadership Expert
,
Advance HE
Jenny
Jenny is a leadership development consultant, specialising in executive coaching, facilitation and research in the area of leadership and change. She is an experienced facilitator of programmes for managers, directors and CEOs from a variety of organisations, including private and public sector.

Lisa Sofianos

Senior Associate and Coach
,
Advance HE
lisa sofianos
Lisa is a senior associate and coach at Advance HE, co-facilitating Advance HE’s Strategic Leadership Programme along with a number of other open and bespoke senior HE leadership programmes. She works internationally and across all sectors in the fields of organisational development, change leadership, strategic leadership and authentic leadership.

Louisa Hardman

Programme Director
,
Advance HE
Louisa Hardman
Louisa is a respected leadership consultant, coach and facilitator, working with international clients in the public and private sectors to achieve real learning and change. She was an early Key Associate with the Leadership Foundation, has contributed to TMP since 2009 and been Programme Director since TMP 32.

Wendy Rose

Coach
,
Advance HE
Wendy Rose
Wendy specialises in supporting academics moving into senior strategic leadership and / or managing significant organisational change. Adept at facilitating personal, interpersonal and institutional change involving the different levels of mind, body, spirit and organisational system. She has worked with leaders from more than 40 countries and is accredited as an International Coach Federation MasterCoach; a level reached by only 1% of coaches globally.

Gary Reed

Coach
,
Advance HE
Gary Reed
Gary is a Leadership Coach with experience as a senior leader in HE. He is creator of 'The Leadership Tree', a model developed from his own experience as an introverted leader and his work with existing, aspiring and reluctant leaders across higher education and healthcare. Gary specialises in helping clients to discover their leadership mindset without losing their integrity.

Barbara Bassa

Senior Consultant, Leadership and Organisational Development
,
Advance HE
Barbara Bassa
Barbara is a versatile senior advisor and programme director who works across the higher education sector in the UK and worldwide. She holds a broad remit of responsibility and a diverse portfolio of projects, working with senior and aspiring university leaders on a wide range of national and bespoke programmes, driving strategic development, effective team collaborations and culture change.

Lesley Dobree

Executive Coach
,
Advance HE
Lesley Dobree
Lesley Dobree is an experienced leadership development consultant, specialising in executive coaching and leadership development. Within universities, Lesley has worked with leaders in a range of academic and professional service roles, including DVCs, PVCs and Directors of Professional Services.

Duncan Piper-Blake

Executive coach, facilitator and consultant
Duncan Piper-Blake
Duncan Piper-Blake is an executive coach, facilitator and consultant based in Hove. He is trained by the International Coach Academy and credentialed by the International Coaching Federation, the world’s leading coaching body.

He has a particular interest in supporting senior leaders to bring innovation to the HE sector, help them increase institutional performance and place student experience at the heart of their provision.
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