Siân Taylor

About

I specialise in coaching leadership capability, capacity and confidence in complex environments.

What is happening for you:

• building your resilience and effectiveness in uncertain and stressful environments
• deepening awareness of yourself and others, how you respond to difficult, challenging, complex situations and the impact you have on others
• helping you understand when and where you may feel vulnerable and how you may utilise this positively
• if you are transitioning into a new role; what your new role means for you, how others may now view you, helping you reaffirm the strengths you bring to your new role and acknowledging what you may be leaving behind

How you engage with others: 

• enhancing your capacity in high pressured situations, aiding you to demonstrate care and compassion for others
• strengthening your ways of working with others to develop and articulate clear common purpose
• working with you through difficult or challenging conversations and situations
• enhancing how you develop the capability and capacity of others; as individuals and as teams and departments/services

Stepping back to see the bigger system:

• supporting you to cultivate a culture and environment that is empowering, motivating and inclusive throughout your organisation
• consolidating your capacity in managing uncertainty in complex environments, and across organisational boundaries
• broadening your natural influencing style to develop and sustain positive relationships with stakeholders from a diverse backgrounds and organisations
• deepening your capability in managing a myriad of differing expectations and points of view, particularly on contentious issues, and finding constructive ways forward

Coaching experience

I work with leaders at all levels; Chief Executives, Exec Directors, Senior Leaders, Middle-Managers and front-line staff. This includes Higher Education Institutions, the NHS, the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector, Small-Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs), large commercial business and Local Government.

I have worked with individuals from a range of professional backgrounds, experts within their field including professors, research centre directors, heads of school, medical directors, nurses, finance directors, marketing and professional services.

I am a highly experienced one-to-one coach working with individuals both in-person and in the virtual space, with over 500 hours of coaching. creating productive and transformational coaching relationships, that have enabled individuals to enhance their leadership capability and capacity.

Coaching Approach:

I draw on a number of different theories to help me tailor my coaching approach to best work with each of my coachees. Elements of Gestalt and a whole person focus are present in my approach. I also use emotional intelligence as a framework, helping raise my coachees awareness, how they appear to others and how they might build positive and productive relationships with others. And I have used aspects of Transactional Analysis and the drama triangle has been a particularly helpful concept for several of my coachees.

I make use of Systems Thinking, from for example Peter Hawkins and Paul Lawrence, to help coachees see how they and other individuals are influenced by peers, stakeholders, organisational culture and cross-organisational working in a larger system frame, and how they might in turn work and influence in those arenas.

I am known for:

• Being supportive and calm with a balance of appropriate challenge
• Demonstrating belief in people’s potential and capability
• Treating people with respect and dignity
• Acting with integrity, openly and honestly
• Being non-judgmental, offering observational feedback and allowing people to choose to act upon it or not
• Focused on individual needs and goals in the context of the wider organisation and system environment
• Understanding challenges leaders face, and working in partnership with individuals and organisations

Issues explored in coaching:

• Building confidence
• Being authentic especially if working in a different way to the prevailing organisational culture
• Influencing senior colleagues effectively
• Leading in alignment with own values as well as organisational objectives
• Establishing and asserting own identity whilst dealing with imposter syndrome
• Strengthening and utilising emotional intelligence within leadership style

Dealing with and managing uncertainty, ambiguity, complexity and the impact on self and other

Professional background

Siân has been a professional coach for over 7 years working with individual senior leaders and teams, has facilitated on a major culture change programme ‘Coaching for Culture’ within the NHS and provides 360 feedback coaching sessions to support individual’s leadership development. Siân also coach mentors small-medium sized business owners as part of the government-backed Help to Grow programme.

Before this, she had over 15 years leadership and management experience in academia and corporate pharmaceutical industry, having trained as a biologist. In recent years working for a high-profile academic research centre as part of the senior leadership team, Siân found her coaching skills and approach invaluable in navigating the complex and at times acrimonious circumstances surrounding her, enabling her to provide members of staff with a compassionate space during some particularly difficult times.

Alongside her coaching and facilitation, Siân has worked on a broad number of research and evaluation projects for NHS organisations, including evaluation of leadership development programmes and collating research evidence on leadership topics such as System Leadership and Anchor Leadership in the NHS. Siân also undertakes quality assurance checks for ILM coach qualification and Association for Coaching coach accreditation scheme, and is now running her own ILM5 Coaching and Mentoring Certificate programme with her colleague and fellow coach Debs Hirst.

Qualifications and accreditations

• Qualified Leadership & Executive Coach, Institute of Leadership and Management Level 7 (ILM7)
• Accredited Executive Coach with the Association for Coaching
• Trained Team Coach, Team Coaching Studio
• Trained Coach Supervisor, Barefoot Coaching (currently studying for PG Cert in Coaching Supervision with University of Chester)

Case Studies

I was invited to work with an academic Research Centre Director, at the University of Leeds, who had been appointed into role from another institution, and was finding the role complex and political. My coachee wanted to:

1. lead with authority and in a way that is inclusive and does not jeopardise personal relationships
2. communicate assertively but authentically challenge inappropriate/disrespectful/undermining behaviour in public or private interactions, without losing sight of the bigger task of inspiring research ambition among colleagues
3. Early in our coaching, I realised that my coachee found visual metaphors a powerful way of exploring the dynamics and tensions in establishing positive working relationships. We used storytelling techniques that helped my coachee change their approach in difficult situations and as a result, they began to role-modelling and challenge behaviour in a way that felt authentic to them.

Testimonials

“Working with Sian has been a transformative experience during a challenging transition phase in my career at a new institution. Through Sian’s deeply empathetic, genuinely invested and non-judgmental coaching style, I was able to see, name and begin to address on a very practical level the specific layers of a complicated organisational and interpersonal setting, which was negatively affecting my work with others.”