VA believe a work life balance is now becoming a work life blend and a key ingredient to employee engagement. We’re supporting our clients to adopt fundamental practices around compassionate, visionary leadership with a straightforward narrative and clear communication. We believe in giving people a voice, developing trust that allows people to bring their best self to work. We’re supporting our clients to develop organisational clarity and consistency with equal measures of stretch, feedback, coaching and development.

Leadership approaches and the challenges being faced are changing: – unceasing transformation, a tech and digital revolution, globalisation, growing complexity, a multi-generational workforce and constant, never-ending change. There is now no place to hide and leadership is responding by being more driven by purpose and value creation, shifting from heroic individual leaders to collective and collaborative leadership.

Unconscious bias is relevant to every person in every business. It can influence decision making across an organisation through recruitment, promotion and performance management. Unconscious bias impacts diversity, retention rates, engagement, succession planning and personal development. It can also be instrumental in promoting a disconnected culture that can help with team cohesiveness. VA’s Unconscious Bias programmes allows businesses to thrive by helping organisations understand and address biases.

We are living and working in unprecedented times. We are hurtling from a predictable stable world with cause and effect decisions and linear thinking to one of complexity, unpredictability and rapid change. Today’s organisations need to be agile living systems, quick in responding to changes in the marketplace or environment, reacting to the emergence of new competitors, rapid advancements in technology and sudden shifts in overall market conditions.

People matter and VA believe that organisations must ensure their approach to people management does not put any group or individual at a disadvantage. Valuing the diversity of thoughts, ideas and ways of working that people from different cultures, experiences and identities bring to an organisation has huge business benefits. It helps people grow and learn, to reach their full potential, improve decision-making, boosts engagement and innovation, and enables businesses to better meet the needs of their customer.

Research has repeatedly shown clear correlation between gender diversity in leadership and business performance. Organisations with greater than average gender diversity have higher return on equity, higher operating profit and higher stock price. There are also correlations with organisational agility, quality and speed of decision making and problem solving. It’s not simply the presence of women that create these positive results, it’s the balanced presence of men and women. The diversity brings different perspectives which results in wiser and better outcomes.

Organisational Development is the practice of adapting, improving and evolving an organisation so that it can grow or advance. People and culture lie at its core and determine how effective, competitive and sustainable organisations are.

For VA, Organisational Development is an holistic approach to implementing strategy and improving organisational effectiveness with the full involvement and release of the talents and energy of its people.

As with physical health we all have mental health that varies by individual and can fluctuate over time. Mental illness is one of the most rapidly increasing causes of long-term sickness absence. Poor mental health and wellbeing can have incredibly adverse effects on the workforce and individuals’ ability to perform and thrive. With the pace of change and demands on today’s workforce it’s more critical to bring awareness of mental health to the forefront of people’s consciousness.

We see more and more organisations employing executive coaches. As businesses become more complex, more people will turn to coaching to deal with key business issues for support in understanding how to act in today’s fast-paced and fiercely competitive business environment. Leaders are increasingly expected to do ever more with ever less. Our approach involves a close engagement with the client organisation to explore and fully understand the context within which the coaching relationship fits. The right match is absolutely key to success.

We develop and coach teams in the context of their organisation to understand their unique challenges – their commission, their collective purpose and how they will work together, as a team and with other stakeholders, to deal with these demands.