Meet the team
We are a small company and if you choose to work with us you will generally be working directly with Steve. We like to keep things direct and personal.
However we have a lovely extended professional family of associates we work with when additional capacity and expertise is required. They are a great bunch who bring a huge amount of experience, energy and insight to our projects and programmes.
Steve Hargreaves
Founder & Director of The Compassionate Leadership Company
Steve is a qualified Executive Coach and Mentor with extensive operational experience as a Director, having over the last 20 years worked across a range of sectors, leading and transforming large scale, commercial, regulated care and charitable services across the UK.
Author of The Compassionate Leader’s Playbook and recognised as one of the Top 40 Global Organisational Culture Champions in 2022. Managing Director of the Year 2023 for Leadership Innovation and Organisational Development. Finalist in National Startup of the Year 2023.
He has been described as a pioneer in the ‘freedom to speak up’ movement, undertaking the role of Freedom to Speak Up Guardian for a national organisation, working to build psychologically safe team cultures, where employee well being, and improving emotional culture has been a major focus.
An experienced coach, facilitator, trainer & speaker. Steve delivers a range of bold and innovative workshops and bespoke programmes to a wide range of organisations supporting their leaders and teams through change and transition.
ILM (7) Level Executive Coach and Mentor. Accredited Specialist ‘Pro Rider’ & Certified Facilitator of the Emotional Culture Deck. Member of the European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC), Climate Coaching Alliance (CCA) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA).
Dan Symonds
For Dan life is all about people – connecting with them, developing and supporting them and helping
them to become the best possible versions of themselves.
With over 20 years’ experience in learning and development, he has worked with and within a wide
variety of regulatory and legislative organisations, as well as multi-national businesses within the
retail and finance sector.
Through the design and delivery of programmes focusing on the key principles of emotional
intelligence, he gives participants practical ‘tools’ to take back into their workplace to improve their
relationship management skills.
As a facilitator and coach who works with a wide variety of clients, from new and early talent
through to managers, he revels in raising self-belief, confidence and situational awareness to ensure
positive outcomes for participants and those they manage.
His company focuses on helping workplaces provide safe and supportive learning environments that
are free of fear, judgement and criticism.
Dan is Founder and Director of Akoranga Learning.
Simone Ingram
Simone is a former HR Director, Board Trustee and an accredited Executive Coach with over 20 years international corporate and leadership experience.
She supports her clients through various approaches including – getting them to understand their beliefs, values and the impact of these on their behaviours, recognise their blind spots and deal with any limiting beliefs. By enabling greater self-awareness and emotional intelligence, she empowers her clients to recognise their full range of their capabilities leading to increased confidence, resilience, agility, creativity of thought and refining of their leadership style to enable them to grow and be more authentic and compassionate leaders.
Her clients describe her coaching style as calm, warm, results focused, challenging, and inspiring with a ‘genuine passion and commitment to really making sure the coaching she provides adds value and makes a difference to the individual and or the team’.
Simone is the Founder and Director of 3E Coaching.
Amanda Whitlock
Amanda is an experienced Wellbeing and Mental Health Trainer and instructor. Accredited by Mental Health First Aid England, she provides both MHFA-Accredited and bespoke training.
For individuals who want to look after their own mental health and maintain their wellbeing, Amanda provides training, together with the toolkit to enable the right conversations to be had.
Amanda also helps business owners and managers looking to provide the correct support for employees, and provides online and face to face courses to enable every workplace to provide the right environment and support for employees.
Amanda is passionate about facilitating training for anyone who wishes to increase their understanding about Mental Health.
For 15 years, Amanda worked in the charity sector providing strategic management and business development. Prior to founding her business, she was National Wellbeing Manager for a charity which specialized in providing advice, guidance and support for older people.
Amanda’s company provides resources and training in mental health to corporate and individuals alike across the UK.
Amanda is Founder and Director of Total Wellbeing Matters.
Sarah Bourne
Sarah is a qualified ILM Executive Coach, member of the Association for Coaching, An associate member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), NLP Practitioner and Insights Discovery Licenced Practitioner, with a postgraduate diploma in Human Resource Management from the University of Portsmouth. Sarah specialises in enhancing your self-awareness, emotional intelligence, communication and relationship skills.
Sarah's sphere of excellence is coaching and training managers and leaders through their learning journey, being new to management or having acquired a new team, when their team isn't as harmonious as they would like or when there is that one person grinding your gears!
Sarah believes that coaching unlocks your full potential, provides a sounding board for ideas and offers supportive challenge to get you out of your comfort zone.
Alongside coaching sessions, Sarah works with the Insights Discovery profiles to take a deep dive into self-reflection and create a lasting impact on the whole team.
Sarah offers one to one or group coaching, off the shelf and bespoke training sessions and Team Development Programmes.
Sarah is Founder and Director of Shades of You.
Richard Lambert
Rich has 25 years of experience of working with his clients to devise bespoke employee engagement strategies to increase staff retention and improve both individual and business performance. This is done through developing a deep understanding of what really makes your employees tick and what drives their motivation and morale.
He uses a combination of quantitative tools (surveys and assessments) and qualitative methods (workshops and discussion groups) to help clients base their people strategies on data, facts and real stories - rather than supposition, guesswork and gut-feel.
Rich’s company - Morale Solutions - works across a range of industry sectors with business of all shapes and sizes, from 25 staff up to 25,000. He has contributed to several Engage for Success ‘Thought and Action Groups’ and chaired a judging panel at the Employee Experience Awards.
Rich is Founder and Director of Morale Solutions.
Karen Skehel
Since 2002, as a leadership, executive, business and personal coach, Karen has helped hundreds of clients in many different sectors with many leadership and personal challenges in order to achieve happiness, wellness and success through coaching with a compassion focused dimension.
Since covid, Karen has developed a repertoire of self compassion in the workplace workshops delivered online and have taken her self compassion wellness initiatives online via zoom to participants both locally and around the world to great effect.
Karens’s claims to fame including coaching in front of 1 and 1/2 million people on the UK's most popular daytime programme (UK's answer to the Oprah show) and over 4 years she wrote for Natural Health magazine as the Soul Doctor and the Life Coach addressing readers life challenges every month
Several million viewers have watched her Compassion Focused Well-being initiatives on BBC One (The One Show) and on international TV as far afield as South Korea
Karen is now helping organisations improve productivity and reduce mental health absences with compassion focused leadership coaching and compassion focused well being initiatives.
Karen is Founder and Director of WOW Coaching & Meditation.