ELENA FOULKES
COACH - TRAINER - TEAM FACILITATOR - CONSULTANT
Elena Foulkes is an experienced coach, management trainer, team facilitator and management consultant who supports people and teams with complex workplace and life challenges.
She is skilled at helping people communicate and operate effectively across international and social cultural boundaries. She has worked in many different cultures and industries – from West Virginia to Mumbai, from aerospace to pharmaceutical to youth choirs.
She has over 20 years of coaching experience and a background in Creative Problem-Solving, change management and innovation processes.
She delivers her services in English, French and Italian.
COACHING
I work with people who are dealing with complex challenges.
When you are confronted great opportunities, difficult choices, or significant change, I provide a context of complete confidentiality, attention and acceptance for you to explore, understand and define your challenge, articulate the personal and contextual boundaries of the situation, evaluate the real risks and opportunities, and find your way forward.
The process often involves identifying key relationships which could impact your choices, and surfacing unconscious belief systems that might be limiting your options.
I often work with people who have “tried everything else,” but who still believe there are options and actions that can be taken to unblock their situation.
CLEARING
Clearing is a coaching approach is based on the premise that all problems can ultimately be attributed to breakdowns in communication, and challenging scenarios can be managed by improving communication between stakeholders.
Clearing offers an effective way to “unfreeze” a situation and move forward by identifying all of the actors involved and untangling their underlying interests, values and objectives.
Workplace challenges can be attributed to many sources, including processes, structure and organization. Ultimately, however, the key individuals involved in making things happen and their interactions with one another are fundamental to the success or failure of an initiative.
In other words, unblocking a situation often involves managing your relationships with the people who have an active role in the challenge you are facing.
According to a study carried out in 2005 by Vitalsmarts in collaboration with the Concours Group, “Senior executives frequently bet their companies on high-stakes efforts like major product releases, strategic IT projects, organizational restructurings, …, or aggressive quality initiatives. And these bets rarely pay off as anticipated… With estimated failure rates ranging from 72 to 91 percent…” The study is entitled “Silence Fails” and their conclusion is that when key stakeholders and decision-makers fail to speak up and have crucial conversations with each other, projects and initiatives collapse, at the cost of huge investment and, in some cases, careers.
Clearing begins with identifying and surfacing all facets of a complex scenario, particularly the more uncomfortable aspects we struggle to express to our stakeholders. Then, using advanced coaching techniques, possible conversations with these key actors are simulated, in order to clearly articulate what can – and can’t – be done to resolve the situation, and move forward.
Having trained at the IEC (Institut Européen de Clarification) with Jean-Christophe Vidal, I am a qualified Clearer, and employ this approach successfully with executives who find themselves facing complex challenges and opportunities in their professional lives.
“Elena’s support has been instrumental in helping the Chamber to grow into a successful organisation. Over the course of two years – including during the global pandemic – she has worked systematically with the Chamber’s board and staff to identify and resolve long-standing and deep-rooted issues which were hindering its progress. As a direct result of Elena’s assistance, the Chamber has much improved internal management with a clearer focus and direction. The team now works more harmoniously and with greater clarity of purpose and has adapted to working in a more agile way, all of which has been crucial to business maintenance through Covid. As a consequence, the Chamber is more positive and more efficient which means we can deliver much better for our members.”
– Tom Noad, President BCCI
MANAGING CULTURAL DIFFERENCES
An area of communication with a significant potential for misunderstandings is when we find ourselves working with people from other cultures. Having grown up both Italian and British, I have become an expert at navigating the issues generated when these two cultures meet.
I have extensive experience helping Italian senior managers who need to perform in an international environment, in a second language, and navigate different cultural expectations. I support executives with the challenges of decoding non-explicit communication, identifying what behaviours work best when operating in an Anglo-Saxon context, and with strategies for effective public speaking in a second language.
Our preconceptions about the way people interact – from leadership and meetings to socializing and humour – are culturally specific. Attitudes to punctuality, for example, vary enormously across different nationalities.
Challenging our own assumptions about people’s motivations, objectives and values is key to fine-tuning our “contextual intelligence”: the ability to suspend judgement about the behaviour and intentions of others. This is the foundation of the most advanced communication skills, making it possible to interact effectively across cultural borders.
PUBLIC SPEAKING & EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION
The ability to communicate effectively with people at all levels in an organization and with external stakeholders can make the difference between achieving goals and failing to do so. Communicative skill is often the single most important indicator of a successful career, even more than technical or professional competence.
How often do we need to persuade, negotiate with or inspire the people we work with? Anyone whose success depends on the performance and cooperation of other people can – and should – develop their public speaking and communication skills.
Communication is a process that involves the transfer, reception, comprehension and acceptance of information, a process during which any number of things can go wrong. How often do we believe we have clearly communicated something to another person only to discover that our message has not been heard, understood or accepted? Successful communication involves checking understanding, reformulating, simplifying, using analogy, open and closed questions, and often a lot of preparation, design and practice.