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 have worked with Kris now for over 6 years at both OFWAT and now at IOSH and cannot recommend Kris highly enough. She is a highly skilled and sensitive coach; an excellent facilitator of teams and a very experience OD/leadership consultant. Kris very skilfully and subtly gets to the heart of an issue for an individual/team and helps, through sensitive, emotionally intelligent facilitation to unlock thinking, she firmly, but gently and constructively challenges and will not shy away from any difficulties which emerge. She has facilitated my senior leadership team development sessions and my team think she is amazing. We really valued the insights and perspectives she brings and the safe environment she creates. I can testify to the improvement in team performance and relationships as a result of the work we have done together. She is a generous consultant, who keeps in touch with the team regularly, between sessions, providing an objective sounding board and a safe space which I know people find really valuable. In short, I thoroughly endorse Kris for senior team development and individual coaching and look forward to continuing to work with her.
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.
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!
Space to Think
“My experience with Space to Think was exceptional. As a Professor of Computer Science, it is often the case that we do not have time and space to think about new research problems and solutions. The two days activity allow me to think “out of the box”, brainstorm about new research questions and possible ways to investigate these questions, as well as come up with prioritisation of next steps. All of that was, supported by a technique and in an environment in which the brain could flow without any barriers or constraints. David’s coaching was paramount to support the entire process. I really enjoyed the whole experience and have used the method afterwards, in smaller ways, to support my work.”
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.