Ian Patterson

Ian has extensive commercial experience over 23 years. He has run his own learning and development business for over 10 years dealing with an impressive range of UK banks, insurance companies and leading professional services companies. This includes extensive work in the areas of assessing and developing leadership skills, coaching and regulated sales.

Prior to this, he had a successful sales career in a variety of roles and moved into training to use this experience to develop others. He headed the training department of one of the largest UK insurance companies where he was directly responsible for a department of 27 staff and the training needs of around 7,000 staff.

Qualifications and experience

• BA (Hons), Kings College London
• Chartered Insurance Practitioner
• Advanced Certificate in Coaching and Mentoring (part Masters qualification accredited by Oxford Brookes University, Oxford)
• Former Chairman of the Sales Training Association
• Qualified to administer and interpret Saville and Holdsworth personality questionnaires
• NLP practitioner

Specialist fields

• Encouraging and developing leadership potential
• Customer care projects ranging across People Handling, Customer Process Management and Ambassador Training.
• Using a range of approaches to encourage executives to raise their awareness of their own behaviour and the impact of this on others
• Managing performance issues
• Development of sales performance / influencing skills

Recent examples

• Provided coaching to a senior manager as part of an ongoing leadership development programme. Ian worked closely with him to identify areas of his behaviour that were acting as a break on performance. This process included both self-analysis and observation of a team event to enable specific and objective feedback to be provided. It also included supporting the manager to apply the course learning to real work issues.
• A large financial services firm was looking to build a team of coaches to support the business units. Ian worked with them to select staff for the coaching role and put in place a structured development programme to build and supervise the coaches.
• The behaviour of a director of a stockbroker was undermining effective relationships with his colleagues and direct reports. Using interviews and a diagnostic questionnaire, Ian worked with the individual to identify and develop a more inclusive and flexible management style. The ongoing use of 360 degree questionnaires demonstrated the sustained change in behaviour.
• A senior sales manger was having difficulties achieving team sales targets. Through 1-2-1 coaching with Ian, he was able to develop a more cohesive strategy for managing his team of remote salespeople. Ian designed feedback forms to clarify and identify blocks within the team and then worked with the manager address these. This contributed to an improvement in team sales performance of over 15%.

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