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Peter Ryding speaks with the quiet determination you’d expect from someone on a serious mission. There’s none of the typical personal development hoopla or hyperbole that we’ve become accustomed to. In their place are sincerity and a fervent belief in coaching… Ryding’s a true believer in the enormous benefits that coaching can bring to the individual, the company, the country and to the world.
His passion is obvious in his language and expression. He wants to widen the impact of coaching and extend the reach of The Coaching Academy community to many, many more people in a variety of situations. In fact, his personal mission is for The Coaching Academy to impact over one million people’s lives in a positive way in the next five years. This will, he says, require a passionate community of qualified coaches who love what they do - helping others - and at the same time allow them to reap the personal freedom, emotional satisfaction and financial rewards that a coaching career can provide.
It’s no surprise therefore when he says that becoming Chairman of The Coaching Academy is ‘a dream come true’.
‘The Coaching Academy is already a fantastic organisation with an incredible community of coaches, trainers, staff and others who are already making a real difference,’ he says. ‘They are helping others change their lives on a daily basis both as professional coaches and in using the skills they have learnt from The Coaching Academy courses in everyday life – in the way they interact with and help others. That’s one of the great things about coaching: it is a real life skill that can enrich the lives of everyone connected with it - coaches and the people they coach and of course the friends, family members and colleagues of those people who have been coached. It’s just like throwing a pebble into a pool … those positive ripples spread out into the world.
‘For many people, The Coaching Academy is at the heart of those ripples. We are the largest trainer of coaches in the world and have the largest community of coaches anywhere. We have already helped over 100,000 people improve their lives. Wow! That is something that the whole of The Coaching Academy community should be very proud.’
Ryding will not be a behind-the-scenes kind of Chairman – he will play a key role in ensuring The Coaching Academy, its trainers, students and graduates will continue to effect positive change in the world. ‘I believe that we can help far, far more people. We have the very best trainers, excellent courses and a tremendously passionate community of trainee and qualified coaches. With such a combination we are only limited by our own vision and beliefs. We can achieve whatever we set our hearts and minds upon. And that is why I am so thrilled to be Chairman of The Coaching Academy at this exact moment in the development of coaching and The Coaching Academy.
‘Coaching is a booming sector and a highly respected occupation. It has evolved through a period where it was perceived as some kind of New Age fad and has become a mainstream professional activity. It is no coincidence that two of the highest paid professions – Hollywood film acting and international sports - have been using coaching for decades. Nowadays, you couldn’t get anywhere near the peak of either profession without a top coach.
‘The same logic applies to anyone who wants to be a top achiever whether in business or outside it – having a coach is perceived as a vital ingredient of success, whatever the area. When I started coaching back in the 1980s, business people considered coaching to be a remedial option for under-achievers. Having a coach then was something to be embarrassed about and certainly not something anyone really aspired to. This was still the case for many people during the 1990s. However, the true power of coaching is now much better understood and many people, especially in business, consider being coached as a badge of honour. It symbolises how highly they are valued by their company – that the company is prepared to invest what can be very substantial fees to make them more successful. A company knows that the investment will be repaid many times over in both the short and long term. In fact NOT having a coaching programme can be a real turnoff for high flying executives in all levels of organisations. That is why so many companies are now setting up such programmes and seeking help in doing so.
‘That is where The Coaching Academy can help. We have a fantastic pool of trainers and coaches and trainee coaches at different levels of experience and qualifications. I believe that all of us who are engaged in the world of coaching have the opportunity to tell the world how coaching and in particular The Coaching Academy community can help them be more successful. Of course, we can also help them define what success means to them in the first place.’
With 25 plus years of experience in the corporate world (including working in some of the largest organisations in the world, SMEs, pre-revenue start-ups, central government, charities and the NHS), Ryding has the contacts and the expertise to forge strong links between the business world and The Coaching Academy… something which will have very real benefits for its students and graduates.
‘I have many contacts in such organisations, some of whom have already expressed an interest in working with The Coaching Academy and its community of coaches and trainers. In our coaching community, we must have thousands of contacts and if we pool them and apply a central expertise of sales and marketing, we should all be able to make an even bigger difference and so receive a share of the benefits delivered and the value created. That is my mission: to take The Coaching Academy to a much wider audience, be it into the corporate world, to other international markets, and to provide a wider set of services based upon our desire and core competencies of helping others be happier and more successful. The win-win here is that this will also create massive opportunities for those members of The Coaching Academy community who are trained, qualified and accredited in the current and future skill sets and who engage with this mission.’
As you’d expect from someone so versed in coaching, Ryding is keen to take action on his goal NOW. He wants to hear from coaches who are keen to be part of The Coaching Academy community. ‘I would love to hear from anyone who has good contacts within any large organisation and who believes The Coaching Academy can help. We are the most established coach training organisation and we have a reputation for first class trainers and training. My aim is to take this fantastic heritage and capability into organisations that will benefit from it. So if you are in such an organisation or know someone else who is – please let me know. Who knows where this could lead? This is what I love about being on a mission: the direction is set upfront but the detail emerges as you proceed depending upon who you meet and how the relationship develops.
‘There are still millions of people who have yet to benefit from coaching and I want to find a way of reaching them now, showing them what coaching can do for them and encouraging them to get involved, either to be coached by one of our trained and accredited coaches or to become one themselves. I think there is a real opportunity for us all.’
Besides entering the corporate arena, he plans to establish The Coaching Academy overseas. ‘My personal goal is to take The Coaching Academy international – initially to English-speaking countries like North America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa… Some Coaching Academy
Licensees are already talking to me about countries they would like to take The Coaching Academy to… countries in the Middle East, as well as Europe.’
In recent weeks, he has launched the Academy Club Plus. He believes this is another way of widening the awareness and impact of coaching and The Coaching Academy. Academy Club Plus members will share a range of learning opportunities via such media as the Internet, podcasts and CDs. They will also be able to attend a monthly workshop at venues near to where they live. ‘It’s a fantastic opportunity for people to belong to a networking group of like-minded people who are passionate about coaching and personal development.’
At those monthly meetings, they’ll be able to share experiences of their coaching lives or other aspects of their personal development, discuss issues, and go into groups of maybe two or three people where they can coach each other on things that are going on in their lives. There will also be an opportunity to listen to a speaker who will be chosen from The Coaching Academy trainers or other leaders in the personal development arena. Those speakers will rotate around all the groups so everyone will have an opportunity to hear them.
As a special launch offer, people who join now as charter members will have their £200 joining fee waived. ‘We’ll also be waiving the subscription fee for the first two months so that people have an opportunity to “try before they buy”,’ says Ryding. ‘It makes it even more of a no-risk opportunity for people to get involved in this initiative, and to check it out and to see if it suits them. We will be asking for their feedback so we can continuously improve the service we provide. We are creating the UK’s leading coaching and personal development group where they can network, learn from each other and from specialist speakers who we invite to get involved.’
Ryding’s passion for coaching is the result of experiencing the benefits in his own life and career and from seeing the impact it has had on individuals and companies that he has coached.
Coaching has played a crucial part in Ryding’s work as a company doctor, where he is called in to help resuscitate failing companies. ‘I coach people and that is unusual for a company doctor. A typical company doctor will go in and fire half the Board on the basis that the company is in trouble and therefore whoever is running it now doesn’t know how to run it. The company will be short of cash so the company doctor will sell off as many assets as possible. What is then left is the shell of the company, leaderless, without any assets and it will often fail within a few years.
‘My approach is very different: my fundamental approach is people will solve this problem – not me. I might come in and give the framework and the clarity but it’s the people who rescue the company, not me. The old model of a company doctor is some sort of Churchillian hero who comes in and says, “I will save the day.” In my view, that’s quite an egotistical approach and it can’t be true because if you’ve got thousands of employees, one person isn’t going to rescue the company. If you can engage all those thousands of people however and get them motivated and coming up with new ideas and re-energise them, I believe you can do the turnaround far quicker.’
His combination of psychology, coaching and business skills is unique within the world of corporate turnaround and in fact underpinned his achievement in winning the prestigious ‘National Business Turnaround of the Year 2004’ Award from The Society of Turnaround Professionals for the work he did over a 14-month period with John Cleese’s world famous Video Arts International Group. The company was well known for its humorous videos including ‘Meetings bloody meetings’ and ‘Who sold you this then?’ In just over a year, he reversed what had been a seven year decline and took it to a position of strong profit and expansion. This was an outstanding success for all stakeholders and challenged many of the preconceptions of how to rescue underperforming businesses.
People were amazed how his coaching-based intervention had re-motivated the entire workforce and liberated a multitude of young talents and ideas that the previous management had stifled. In fact, this profile led to him being asked to coach venture capitalists, accountants and even bankers.
‘I went in and used coaching skills in a very tough commercial environment and it worked: I energised people, I formed them into a team and I gave them tremendous self-confidence and clarity and empowered them to be able to think through what they needed to do to make it happen. As ever the 80/20 rule was critical: finding the 20% of actions that will make 80% of the difference – the same approach that helps individuals achieve their goals, worked in helping turnaround a struggling business.
‘There was some inspirational leadership involved but fundamentally I created the positive environment and the self-belief and they did the turnaround. When I first went in they had all lost self-belief – they thought the company was going to fail. It could have done. If they had continued to think that way, it would have failed. My job was to make them believe in a better future. In a way, I created the path and found a way to deliver it.’
Ryding is a passionate believer in the 80/20 rule: that is, 20% of the effort delivers 80% of the benefit. ‘As humans, we tend to spend only 20% of our time on the 20% of the things that make 80% of the difference… what we should be doing is working out what are the 20% things and putting 80% of our time into that 20%. The simple maths says you become far more productive. In reality it is tough to do that and that’s why you need a coach. A coach can keep you focussed on that 80%.
‘I now have many personal experiences of seeing how coaching can transform cultures and take organisations with low morale and which are really in a bad financial way and transform them into highly inspirational places where people love to go to work and which are highly profitable too. It all comes down to coaching.’ And of course even performing companies can improve dramatically as well, he says. ‘After one 18-month team coaching intervention, the Board put over £60 million of value creation down to the coaching that had highlighted key issues and opportunities and kept the whole company focussed upon the 20% of things that made 80% of the difference.’
His first experience of the benefits of coaching happened almost by chance and at a time when coaching was still in its very early infancy. At the time, he was a salesman for Exxon, selling industrial fuels and lubricants to buyers in large industrial companies. With the advantage of a Degree in Chemical Engineering, Ryding knew how to talk to his potential customers and to find out what they needed from him. The result was that he increased his sales more than any other salesperson in the country (a group that included over 100 experienced sales professionals and a dozen other graduates). He won the company’s ‘National Salesman of the Year’ award. His secret? ‘To be honest I did not really appreciate what I had done. I had simply been going to see potential customers, asking them about them and their business and what I would have to do to win it. The company sent a senior manager out to shadow me and he said that I was asking open-ended questions and elicited far more information about the customers’ issues than typical salespeople and then clarified the relative importance (the priorities) as seen by the buyer. I then found ways of matching solutions to those problems where price was only a second order priority. I didn’t know it but that was my first learning about the tremendous power of simple techniques that form the heart of many coaching approaches: open questions and prioritisation.
‘I was then promoted into the marketing department where I learnt many marketing techniques which have stood me in good stead ever since. In fact as a CEO, I have often found that marketing is at the heart of every successful company and so I have tried to steadily build my awareness of such techniques.’
As he progressed in other areas of Exxon, he learnt more about leadership. ‘I discovered that wherever I went within the organisation, the more that I focussed on my own development rather than telling other people where they were going wrong, the more potent a leader I became. People chose to follow me instead of simply complying with what I – as the boss – told them to do. It’s a special thing that comes from EARNING the right for people to follow your lead – “followship”.’
His interest in personal development and management development began to grow. ‘I started going on more self-development courses and programmes… I got hooked by finding out more about me and leadership and how to motivate other people.’ It’s an interest that has never waned. ‘I have studied the art and science of leadership for years. This includes an obsession with reading hundreds of books about great leaders and their stories and their secrets and studying many different forms of psychology and coaching. I am a great believer in continuous learning and love meeting experts in their own field, especially in the area of human potential and personal development. As well as helping my career, it is a fascinating hobby and I suspect critical for anyone who wants to stay at the leading edge of the coaching world.
‘I have found the results of using these skills and the confidence that the skills can give us as coaches can be amazing and deeply satisfying. My clients have told me that I have saved their marriages, their companies, even their lives! Others say that I have shown them how to find purpose, inner contentment, happiness, and self-actualisation and sometimes they have found who they are and who they want to be. I know I’m not alone in receiving this kind of feedback: so many coaches I’ve spoken to have had the same thing. It feels great when clients give me their feedback. I feel then that I am really putting something back into the world in a very wholesome and totally positive way.’
Back in the late 1980s, Ryding left Esso and became a venture capitalist with 3i, which involved investing millions of pounds into small entrepreneurial businesses. Much of his time, he says, was helping entrepreneurs turn around companies that were going wrong.
‘Often it was because the business had outgrown the founder and they either had to change, which was often unlikely or they had to leave. Once again the skills of coaching proved very valuable in formulating a reality check and getting the entrepreneur to see the situation as it really was rather than the fantasy that they wanted it to be. Some did change – most did not and so they left. In almost every case this turned out to be right for them. They had made some money and then went on to start another small business. Some did three or four in a row and were far more successful doing this than trying to become a large company manager. Once again it was coaching that helped accelerate this process.
‘I didn’t know that what I was doing was “coaching”… but in fact I was using some of the very basic questions and techniques that The Coaching Academy train. If only I could have gone through the full Protégé Fast Track training programme back then! What a difference that would have made.’
Soon after joining 3i, Ryding decided he needed to broaden his business education and enrolled on a three-year part-time MBA programme at the London Business School. ‘I had worked in a very large organisation – Exxon – with procedures and lots of safety checks and not much innovation. I was then working with entrepreneurs with 3i and they were all about energy, emotion and innovation. I thought by doing an MBA I would be able to learn more quickly about small companies, which I did.
‘Doing a part-time MBA in parallel with my 3i work was the perfect combination because I could learn theory in the morning and try it out in the afternoon. It also showed me that the simple theories developed by business savvy lecturers were the ones to use and to be very wary of senior lecturers who had lost touch with reality – even if they still sold tons of books! I guess that is why The Coaching Academy trainers are so well-respected: they are all practicing coaches who run their own successful coaching businesses. They have been there and done it and in fact still do and they speak with a very pragmatic style and share their real world tips and realities of coaching real clients in real situations.’
Around that time, he met an inspirational South African life coach who introduced him to the theory of coaching. ‘I discovered that if I focussed on learning coaching skills as opposed to generic personal development skills, I could help and motivate other people more quickly. That’s when I started my journey in earnest: I studied NLP, Gestalt, and various other forms of psychology… Meanwhile, my business career took me to new companies. For instance, I had four years at Mars Confectionery the chocolate company and with the music company EMI. Although they were very different companies and sectors, from my perspective they were surprisingly similar because I focussed on the people aspect of the business.’
It was around this time that he went on a self-development course that was to have a huge impact on his life.
‘I chose to go away on a self-discovery long weekend where I explored my background, my beliefs, my dreams and ultimately discovered who I was and who I wanted to be. In NLP terms I discovered my identity and purpose. I discovered I was “pathfinder”. I was someone who helps others define a better future and helps them find the path to achieve it and then helps them along that path to whatever extent is appropriate for them. All of sudden it made sense of my whole life: my childhood interests, my hobbies, and my interest in people and in psychology. It explained my career: the way I ended up helping people sort out their problems, whether it was a buyer of fuel oil worried about a looming oil crisis, an entrepreneur who needed to let go or a management team who had become demoralised and ineffective. The word “pathfinder” made sense. It was what I had been doing and it gave me tremendous insight and focus for what I wanted to do in the future. In fact, at a very deep meaningful and emotional level it gave me purpose. At last, I truly knew who I was – pathfinder and who I wanted to become – the very best pathfinder I could possibly be.
‘People would increasingly come to me and seek advice. Sometimes people who were more senior to me would just ask me to talk them through something and so I was doing coaching but without charging anyone for it. I then thought “Why not set up a coaching business in parallel to my business career?” so in 1999, I established my business. Naturally, the name I chose for my company was “Pathfinder”. It’s all about helping someone to discover where they want to get to and helping them to find the path to reach that destination.
‘Interestingly, this identity – pathfinder- made sense of my twin track career of rescuing underperforming businesses and helping people who had not yet achieved their potential. Many people had said that coaching and being a company doctor were entirely incompatible careers. One required being a hard-nosed hatchet man taking autocratic control, slashing jobs, selling assets and draining all the life from a business, while the other required asking open questions, with no command or control at all. I however saw them as virtually the same thing. First it was about clarifying what a better future could look like then finding the path to get there and then helping them along the journey, sometimes pulling, sometimes pushing but ultimately doing whatever was best for that client. In a word: pathfinding.’
Unlike many management fads, the results from coaching are entirely sustainable, he says. ‘When coaching gets embedded in a company’s culture it becomes part of the company lifestyle, the mindset and it transcends any individual leader. With the right support, the grass doesn’t grow back after a few months or after the person that introduced it has moved on. Most management fads don’t last… as soon as the foot is taken off the pedal or the CEO moves on, the previous jungle grows back and it’s as if there had been no change. Coaching is different: it allows CEOs to leave a legacy. In my view, one of the real measures of truly inspirational leaders is that they not only bring about a change for the better but that they leave a legacy when they move on. All the positive change continues without them. Coaching is the best way to ensure you leave such a legacy.’
With his combined love of coaching and business, it’s not surprising that when the opportunity to take over The Coaching Academy presented itself, Ryding seized it.
‘I’d like to make The Coaching Academy a force for change in the UK and beyond… we are the biggest and the best. Coaching is a tremendous force for change and I am very excited to be playing my part.’
For more information about The Coaching Academy’s Protégé Fast Track Programme or its Corporate & Executive Coaching Programme, please telephone (0208) 789 5676 or email: team@theacademyclub.com. To join The Academy Club Plus, please email team@theacademyclub.com. If you are aware of an organisation that The Coaching Academy can help with coaching or coach training then please contact Peter Ryding directly on email peter@the-coaching-academy.com
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