For senior managers in any organisation the opportunities for a really unbiased and supportive discussion about management issues are very few. The even more senior managers to whom we work are short of time and expect their direct reports to be relatively undemanding of their time and tend to interpret open ended discussions as either a lack of ideas or a lack of decision making ability or both. Similarly it is often not appropriate to use staff at the same level or more junior for discussions that may involve, for example, how to deal with difficult colleagues. So one is left to problem solve and deal with these things without help.

What Nick Heap does is provide a neutral but helpful listening ear to enable you to talk openly about the key problems on your agenda. He encourages you not only to delineate the problem in full but also to express your feelings about the situation. Once that process is underway Nick encourages you to move into a more constructive thinking mode about the issue.

Once at that point he can help you get to the heart of the problem as you see it and then move on to solutions. He can also offer you help in achieving the solution. This might be practical help in terms of running workshops or helping with training events or it might be training you in some techniques to use yourself or simply getting you to elaborate on the analysis to the extent that you can act to deal with the issue.

The impact on the organisation of his contribution is simply better more analytic decision making and planning that is more likely to address the problems identified and rather less stressed out middle managers as well.