Alison Ward

Professionally Qualified Coach and Experienced Financial Services Executive

I have had a successful career spanning almost 30 years in the Financial Services sector in Governance, Risk and Audit roles. During this time the most satisfying and rewarding element of my leadership roles was seeing how people grew in confidence, started to trust their own judgement, and became great managers and leaders themselves. I helped people achieve this with my coaching and mentoring leadership approach.

I stepped away from my corporate career to focus on completing a professional coaching qualification to support the people development aspects that I am passionate about and have enjoyed and been successful with throughout my career.

I offer both pure and blended coaching options.

Pure - would focus on working with a coachee to establish coaching goals and guide and support them in achieving these goals. Blended - would include a level of mentoring where my career experience would benefit a coachee. In this option I would potentially be sharing my knowledge, skills, and experience more directly as advice and possible solutions. This would be discussed and an approximate allocation between coaching and mentoring would be agreed during the initial engagement.

Depending upon location and timings I am happy to be flexible and offer face to face as well as online coaching. Recent engagements have proven to be very successful with a combination of face to face and online or pure online due to being at opposite ends of the country.

​My approach to coaching is that the most effective outcomes arise when there is a genuine openness to share and engage. With this in mind, my style is friendly, informal and professional. Allowing the coachee to build trust in the relationship will ensure the sessions are productive, effective and engaging. I use an intuitive and adaptable approach to determine which of the many tools and techniques available for coaches would best fit the situation and coachee. Using a blend of these tools and techniques ensures they are applied when relevant and appropriate rather than using a standard fixed model or tool as each coachee is unique even if some coaching goals may be similar.