About

July 6th, 2017

Stuart Reid

Hello. I’m glad you found me.

My name is Stuart Reid. I help leaders achieve positive lasting change in behaviour: for themselves, their teams and their organisations.  I believe that change happens one conversation at a time.

The focus of all my work is the people side of change: I work with human beings when they are being human at work. I spend a lot of my time helping managers and leaders have the key conversations they really need to have – with themselves, with their colleagues and with the people who work for them.

I help people to notice and pay attention to what is really going on in the here and now, because that is when change happens.

I am based in the Midlands in England, and work throughout the UK, continental Europe and beyond (I have run workshops in Sweden, Denmark, Finland and South Korea).

In practice my work involves:

  • developing leadership teams;
  • supporting change and transformation initiatives;
  • facilitating large group events; and
  • coaching individual leaders and managers

Developing leadership teams

I work with leadership teams at board level and elsewhere in organisations. I help those teams to clarify their purpose, reflect on how effectively they work and communicate together and make decisions, and review the impact they have on the wider organisation.

Supporting change and transformation initiatives

I help leaders and managers to try out light-touch ways of building greater capacity for change in their organisations. This includes disturbing established habits and patterns of behaviour, introducing novelty, granting permission to experiment and innovate and creating new connections inside and outside an organisation. For me, change is a natural, creative and on-going process in organisations: it happens all the time. It can’t be stopped and can’t really be ‘managed’ or controlled.  I help leaders to keep their nerve when they’re not in control.

Facilitating large group events

I have a particular skill in designing and facilitating large group events. These events can include strategy development awaydays, team-building, post-project reviews and project launch events. I use a range of methods, including Open Space, Appreciative Inquiry, knowledge cafes and more.

Coaching individual leaders and their teams

I provide coaching support to individual leaders one-to-one and their teams as a group, sometimes in combination with developing leadership teams and supporting strategic change. I help leaders to face head-on the issues they find themselves avoiding, and help them to slow down, notice more, and support them in making adjustments to the way they work with other people. People I coach feel well listened to, find me very curious about their perspective and their situation, and get a lot of support from me in trying out new ways of working and behaving.

Recent work

  • Facilitating awaydays for the Permanent Secretary and top team of a central Government department to build the team and help them to develop new ways of working.
  • Designing and facilitating an awayday for a senior leadership team to launch a review of their three-year strategy.
  • Running workshops with staff at all levels – managers, consultants, nurses and porters –  in three London hospitals to embed new values and new ways of working.
  • Working with the management board of a local charity to create a new three-year strategy.

A bit more about me

I have an MSc in Organisational Change at Ashridge Business School. This brought new ideas and approaches into my work, including Gestalt psychology, complexity theory and relational working.

Before running my own consultancy, I worked for twelve years at the Audit Commission, initially in policy and research roles before moving into senior management. In my time there I was personally involved in the merger and de-merger of departments, the launch of new products and services, and coping both with fast growth and with rapid budget cuts. I worked closely with the Chief Executive and Managing Directors on change projects and strategy development. My final three years at the Commission were spent as an internal consultant.

Before working at the Audit Commission I worked in a range of policy and research roles, mainly in the public sector. Prior to that I did some post-graduate study in political philosophy at the University of Arizona, and spent some time as a trainee auditor. My first degree was in Philosophy, Politics & Economics at Oxford University (2:1).

I play bridge, read voraciously, and go geocaching with my children aged 14 and 11. I am learning how to perform magic with playing cards. I avoid gardening.

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