Karen Gallagher
Business Advisor
Leadership Consultant
Employee Engagement Consultant
Coaching Psychologist
Services
Business Advisory
Business restructuring and recovery
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Understand the problem– Detailed commercial due diligence, including financial analysis, rolling cash flow projections; secured creditors covenants, aged and supplier priority creditor analysis, aged debtor analysis, operational and legal structure (and in the context of creditor risk), forward income streams, in depth-due diligence of financial and legal documentation, the business profit model and essential trading assets.
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Evaluating business and operational restructuring options, including finance.
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Effective action planning & reordering of priorities
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Culture adaptation to learning to live poorer mindset and cutting costs without losing the baby with the bathwater.
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Identify opportunities to pivoting the business model for a new market, & generate additional revenue streams
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Technical and practical hands-on support, including negotiating with stakeholders (banks, suppliers, landlords, and debtors). Cash management and financial reporting. Identifying priorities and key performance measures. Communicating with your employees. Managing company assets.
Business Strategy
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Achieve clarity of your vision for the business.
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Facilitate the identification of a shared and aligned vision when there are multiple shareholders.
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Identify what’s in this vision for the employees to buy-in?
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Translate this vision into a strategy.
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Build a management team that can succeed without you.
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Engage your employees.
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Identify profit improvement opportunities
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Exit strategies
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Stay on course.
Leadership Consultancy
To support senior leadership & management performance
One to one coaching, and mentoring to enhance:
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Self-awareness of one’s psychological outlook and how this can impact thinking and behaviour.
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Emotional self-management
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Styles of Leadership Communication
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Psychology of Human Motivation
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Understanding the relationship between performance and stress.
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Strategies for resilient leadership
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Giving and receiving feedback
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Theory and practice of high employee engagement
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Training and developing employees
To support the transitioning into a management / senior leadership role
Typically career progression is seen as moving into a management/leadership role.
People are often promoted into management roles on the strengths of their technical skills, and the founder may have not been exposed to prior roles where they were able to develop their people management skills. However, management is obviously less about the outstanding technical skills and much more about the people management. Typically in SMEs it is assumed that these soft skills are acquired by osmosis. In my experience, how to manage is often inherited, from being managed and typical sector working cultures.
Employee Engagement
I help medium-sized enterprises to enhance their financial performance, scale their operations, to be sustainable and resilient, through enhancing their employee engagement levels.
Engaged employees are emotionally committed to the organisation they work for and it’s goals. They care about their work and their company and as a consequence use discretionary effort.
Highly engaged employees lead too…
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Higher service
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Higher customer satisfaction
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Increased sales
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Higher levels of profit
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Higher staff retention
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Higher creativity
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Higher staff retention
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Higher staff wellbeing.
(CIPD, Gallup. Tower Perrin)
Drivers of high employee engagement (CIPD, 2009 Macleod Review Engaging for Success: enhancing performance through employee engagement):
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Leadership that gives a ‘strong strategic narrative about the organisation’.
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Line managers who motivate, empower, and support their employees.
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Giving employees a valued voice, and to involve employees in decision making.
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Organisational integrity -those stated values are reflected in the actual organisation’s culture – what we say is what we do.
Tools and service:
To understand the opportunities for positive culture change:
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360 diagnostic culture interviews – what is it like to work here.
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Be-spoke Employee Engagement Surveys
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360 Feedback Manager / Senior Leader questionnaires
What is an engaging culture, why do organisations want it?
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The psychological evidence and tools to build and sustain high employee engagement.
To build a shared and aligned vision and implementation strategy:
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Senior Leadership Team Coaching and facilitation.
SME’s by their nature have slim management structures. Founders are often passionate individuals with a high development technical /contextual expertise, that is the kindling for the enterprise. Working on the business rather than in it, can create blind spots. Doing is valued over pressing pause and thinking. People’s values change over time, but this can become difficult to communicate and align.
I help senior leaders identify their visions and to come together around a shared and aligned vision, which will be inspiring and intrinsically motivating for their employees to make a reality.
To support high performing teams and build teams with interdependent and interconnected mindsets:
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Team coaching, for performance enhancement an interconnected/interdependent thinking and behaviours. Enhance self-awareness of how we as individuals show up in a team and the impact of this.
To build a highly engaging workplace culture
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Leadership coaching, consultancy, and psychoeducation
To support emotionally intelligent communication and behaviours, and psychological safety.
Workshops
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How to create a coaching culture in your workplace
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The Transactional Analysis Model of Communication
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Managing with the brain in mind.