For leaders & organisations
Lead with clarity, especially when things aren't.
Executive coaching, leadership development and organisational programmes — grounded in the same body of thought, translated for the room you actually work in.
Why listen to us
Leadership advice from someone who has led.
Vernon Sankey spent over twenty years as a CEO, Chairman and Board member of national and international companies, and the two decades since coaching senior executives — as well as people in politics and sport. He co-founded a coaching company to develop leadership skills before founding Improve My World with Katey Lockwood in 2018.
Katey Lockwood has coached at the highest levels in sport and with public figures, and works with leaders on self-awareness and the responsibility that comes with influence.
Specific company names, board appointments and dates are held as structured fields in ArianaCMS and will be published once Vernon has confirmed exactly which he wants listed. We have not guessed at any of them.
The approach
Better leaders begin with greater awareness.
Not a personality framework, and not a spiritual conversion. Three things, in order.
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01
See the system you are in
Most leadership problems are not individual failings. They are patterns that keep being rewarded. The first work is looking at the pattern rather than the person.
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02
Understand your own effect on it
Everyone senior distorts the room they walk into. Knowing precisely how you distort it is worth more than any new technique.
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03
Widen the gap before the response
Under pressure, decisions collapse into reactions. Everything we teach is, in the end, about buying back the second before the decision.
Leadership challenges
What organisations usually call us about.
The Way, in a working context
No one is going to ask you to become enlightened.
These are the same eight learnings. Read at work, they turn into something quite ordinary — and quite hard.
- Acceptance
- Leading effectively through uncertainty, rather than negotiating with it.
- Attachment
- Not becoming emotionally married to one expected outcome.
- Non-judgement
- Understanding people before reacting to them.
- Stillness
- Creating clarity before an important decision, not after it.
- Kindness
- Human leadership, without mistaking it for weakness.
- Self-awareness
- Understanding how you, specifically, affect the system around you.
Programmes & coaching
Four ways we usually work.
Transformational leadership coaching
Individual work with senior leaders on effectiveness, pressure and the effect they have on their organisation.
Group & team coaching
Built from an assessment first, so the objectives and deliverables are the team's rather than ours.
The Way — corporate course
The eight learnings as a structured programme across a group or organisation.
Managing Toxic People
A practical course for healthier workplaces, based on the book TOXICUM.
Evidence
Stated exactly as it is.
A ‘must read’ for anyone wanting to manage toxicity and restore peace and balance to their life
On the book TOXICUM: Managing Toxic People — not on a coaching or programme engagement
Organisational evidence — including any book-club or programme adoptions — is held as an ArianaCMS placeholder until the exact permitted wording is confirmed with the organisations concerned. We will describe what happened and nothing beyond it.
Next
Start with the situation, not the proposal.
A conversation about what is actually happening in your organisation. If we are not the right people for it, we will say so.