Portrait Barry Woledge

Portrait

Barry Woledge

Barry Woledge lernte seinen Job als Coach „von der Pike auf“ — noch lange bevor er sich beruflich in professioneller Hinsicht ganz dem Coaching verschrieb. Leidenschaft liegt in seinen Worten, wenn er sagt: „Ich bin fest davon überzeugt, dass Hürden dazu da sind, um überwunden zu werden. Dass Probleme immer auch neue Möglichkeiten eröffnen.“ Barry Woledge weiß, wovon er spricht: seine Karriere führte ihn in Zeiten der großen Arbeitskämpfe in Großbritannien in Verantwortung für die Arbeitnehmer- Arbeitgeber-Beziehungen wie auch später für die Privatisierung von British Rail. Seit 1994 ist Barry Woledge mit Leib und Seele Executive Coach.

1. What made you decide to become a coach?

I have always adopted a coaching style in my industrial career and my personal leadership qualities are naturally those of a coach. My long experience in labour relations enabled me to develop the skills of a coach in a real time world. I was always digging below the surface, looking at issues and people from different angles, taking a win-win view of the world and looking for new and alternative perspectives. At the time of course I had no idea the skills I was developing were those of a coach. The realisation started to dawn when as the Human Resources Director for the InterCity business at British Rail (the premium UK railway brand) I was confronted with a government inspired decision to break up the railway and disperse it over 85 different component parts! The scale of this change was so huge it went off the scale and led to many senior executives being highly destabilised and not at all sure about what they wanted to do with their careers. I went in to coaching mode, enabled everyone to exit the privatisation process successfully and in manner they were comfortable with. I enjoyed the process so much I decided, in 1994, to focus wholly on executive coaching as the next stage of my career. Fourteen years later I am still enjoying it immensely.

2. What was your most remarkable success?

One of my most successful coaching assignments came as a complete surprise.

Several years ago one of the most dynamic and charismatic of UK bankers decided to leave Goldman Sachs and join Nomura to set up a Structured Finance business. This was a new departure at the time and was focussed upon Nomura acquiring businesses with under performing assets and using sexy new financial instruments to refinance them. Nomura would seek to get a return on the investment through the issue of income related bonds and then sell the businesses on for a profit.

Needless to say, the team put together for this enterprise were all investment bankers — great at the financial stuff but with no clue as to how to run a business!

I worked with the team on the collective leadership agenda and personally coached several of the top team in to managing the acquired businesses.

The end result is that several of the bankers turned out to be very good business leaders and to this day one of them is the CEO of a FTSE 100 plc in the UK pub trade and another CEO of a private equity backed restaurant business. Neither of these bankers would have ever thought of moving in to business leadership without the Nomura experience and having me as their coach. And that really is a success story.

3. How would you describe Praesta / PIL ?

To me Praesta Partners and PIL are a group of world class individual coaches who have come together under a common banner to learn and share with each other to deliver the very best in executive coaching to the most exacting standards of quality and service.

The unique position of Praesta is that no two coaches are the same. There is a huge breadth and depth to the coaching cadre which means there is never a circumstance where the practice cannot field a world class coach equipped to work with the client.

4. Where would you see PIL in 5 or 10 years?

The world is getting smaller but the challenges of leadership are getting greater in the industrial, commercial, financial and spiritual sense.

In the next decade I would anticipate:

• even more cross cultural working
• the pulling together of leadership teams from multiple cultures
• a further shift in economic power towards the East
• the rise of the Middle East as a financial powerhouse
• the rise of Latin and South America as influential centres not encumbered by toxic debt

Newsletter, 11.2008