About Ascolto
Our vision is that we will make more of a contribution than our customers ever expected, and every individual, team and organisation that trusts us to help them, thrives even more as a result.
About Ascolto and its People
Kris Bush is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist: a specialist in understanding people’s behaviour and performance in the workplace, as individuals, in teams and in the wider organisational context.
Kris has focused much of her work on coaching, mentoring and assisting board level, senior and middle leaders in their personal development, (in the public, private and voluntary sectors).
I originally worked alongside Kris within the National College of Police Leadership, where I witnessed first-hand her skills in coaching and developing senior leaders. I was deeply impressed by her approach and it was clear from direct feedback and observable changes in behaviour, that those she worked with greatly appreciated her support. Sometime later, I was engaged in a significant specialist operational collaboration between forces and sought Kris’s advice on how best to manage the cultural change aspects of merging 3 separate specialisms and teams into a single entity. Kris willingly responded to the challenge and within a week she had met in person with all the strategic stakeholders and held team meetings with practitioners in each of the forces involved. Through this she was able to develop a comprehensive change readiness assessment, which formed the basis of our cultural change strategy. I cannot commend Kris’s work highly enough as she so practically demonstrated the impact of professional engagement with operational staff to develop a jointly-owned approach that has resulted in the creation of an efficient and effective team delivering specialist services for the benefit of the communities served.
I first met Kris whilst working for Ofwat and as we began our business transformation programme which included deep cultural change within the organisation. I approached Kris to help design and deliver a ‘giving and receiving feedback’ workshop that we had identified as a need following our staff survey at the time. Kris was meticulous in her approach, asking questions, challenging me where necessary and guiding me on approaches that she knew would work. The finished product was a highly interactive and experiential learning workshop that proved a significant changer in the way feedback was perceived, and actually used within the organisation. Over a 15 month programme of delivery well over 85% of the people in post at the time completed the workshop. When I joined The Careers & Enterprise Company in 2019 and a similar need for feedback upskilling was identified I approached Kris to help design an intervention. We could have just done a ‘lift and shift’ of our previous workshop however Kris rightly felt we needed to bespoke for the particular organisation. Again detailed analysis and a session with senior leadership to determine what the organisation wanted from this exercise helped design a very different approach and one where we targetted teams. Again highly interactive and successful.
David is a Chartered Engineer, graduate in psychology and holds a doctorate in engineering. He is a qualified executive and career coach, a member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, the Chartered Institute of Management, the British Psychological Society and the Association of Coaching.
His work focus is on releasing potential in people and teams through bringing clarity and creativity to workplace problems and opportunities.
After working in a variety of organisations and teams, he has come to realise that the most important quality of effective working is having fun!
Training Leaders
My experience of David’s work comes, in the main, from supporting David as he managed, led and facilitated a training course for a team of key next generation leaders within NATS. I found David to be incredibly talented as a coach and mentor for the group we worked with. He has a fantastic ability to provide just the right amount of input to allow people to find their own way through some difficult issues and learn from them. I would not hesitate in recommending David to help develop the potential future leaders of any organisation.
David is a hugely intelligent man with a fund of ideas about how to go about solving the innumerable problems of any larger enterprise. His greatest asset is that he realises that it is only through the people that this can be done, and his coaching and mentoring skills are excellent. David is someone who gets a true sense of achievement from seeing others do well – and anyone who recognises the real rarity of that trait will also appreciate what David has to offer.