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Bob Cavanagh

Bob is a self-employed coach and consultant based in Wellington. He has an unusual breadth of experience in a career that includes:

• Twelve years consulting, coaching and facilitation work, including over five years with KPMG Consulting, and involvement in a very wide range of projects in different industry sectors.
• Eight years in the senior IT manager role for private and public sector organisations.
• Formal change management study and change leadership experience in a not-for-profit organisation, providing change workshops and career counselling
• Five years systems and quality improvement experience in the manufacturing sector.
• Work with more than 20 different government agencies.
• Coaching experience at all levels and across a range of organisations.
• A first career spanning 15 years as a Catholic priest and theology lecturer that provided the base of strong interpersonal capabilities together with conceptual, analytical and critical thinking skills.
• Certified NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) Master Practitioner.

Bob's extensive business experience across many functions and organisations (some of which are detailed in the next section) provides the base for a variety of mainly short-term coaching interventions in different industries and at all organisational levels.

His work includes coaching support involving both performance of the person being coached, as well as that of their unit or team, where issues of accountability, delegation and influencing skills have been present. He has also considerable experience in coaching of individuals and groups in situations of organisational change, where people confront challenges of life and career aspirations, personal stress as well as their sense of worth and self-efficacy. He also has been trained in conflict resolution and has experience in structured mediation of several different situations.

He has developed and run various versions of 'Coping with Change' courses (personal change, stress management, life and careers goals etc) and is also a certified trainer of a 4-day course called ‘Transforming Communications’.

On occasion he has been engaged to provide one-to-one business coaching for specific skill development including strategic and business planning, relationship and stakeholder management, opportunity management, and project management.

Bob is also a ‘natural coach’ of people, and he was particularly strong in coaching and developing of his own staff when he held corporate line management positions. Informally he has always been widely regarded as a trusted source of sound advice on work and life, and has frequently provided extensive personal and professional ‘coaching’ type advice on an informal basis to a wide range of people.

• Facilitating workshops with participants from diverse organisations, including: strategic and business planning; tactical and operational planning and problem resolution - working through specific business issues; team building integrated into planning and problem resolution sessions.
• Conducting independent relationship reviews, mainly on behalf of three large NZ organisations in different industry sectors – interviewing senior executives (and sometimes directors) of some of NZ's largest companies including Fonterra, NZ Post, ASB, Telecom, Fletcher Building, TVNZ, and Vodafone, as well as some large central and local government organisations.
• Leading or being part of teams involved in reviews of KPMG's relationship and service management with major international strategic clients in Asia and Africa. (Over 200 such interviews).
• Facilitating numerous strategic and business planning, sometimes with a ‘team-building’ dimension included – mainly for public sector organisations.
• Conducting two reviews for Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), two years apart, of the contact centre structure and operation, and support for the Landonline system.
• Conducting IT support services reviews for different organisations.
• Writing the draft business plan for a revamped Management Development Centre (MDC), now the Leadership Development Centre, as part of government senior leadership and management development strategies.
• Developing the core of the business case for a fees review for national identity documents for Identity Services (|Department of Internal Affairs).
• Significantly contributing to multi-million dollar public sector projects outsourcing IT or other services, and has also conducted interviews with 12 public and private sector organisations to establish conclusions about some NZ approaches to IT outsourcing.
• Conducting, with another consultant, a Leadership Capability Study for a global IT company in NZ.
• Working closely with the new GM Sales of an international insurance firm to design and implement a reporting framework for weekly and monthly performance management.
• Leading or being part of teams involved in reviews of KPMG's relationship and service management with major international strategic clients in Asia and Africa.
• Significantly contributing to multi-million dollar public sector projects outsourcing IT or other services.
• Conducting IT support services reviews.
• Providing consulting advice resulting in major turnaround in call centre performance in just three weeks.
• Establishing on-going procurement savings of more than $2 million dollars for a major transport client.
• Developing and running training workshops on coping with change and job loss, providing management advice in organization change, individual counselling.
• Providing advice and assistance that was considered very valuable to management and staff of an international bank during several months of organisational change.
• Managing a major turn-around in internal customer satisfaction with the IT departments of three different organisations: ICI, Reserve Bank and Internal Affairs (1989-1995).
• Establishing the business case, and managing the NZ-end of a $4m project to migrate ICI computing platform from distributed Wang mini-systems to IBM mainframe based in Melbourne (1989-90).
• Maintaining high levels of commitment among 30 staff destined for redundancy or redeployment during this period.
• Project sponsor or steering committee member in numerous business systems projects from initial requirements definition, feasibility studies, business case development, system selection or build, and implementation.
• Contributing effectively to strategic, operational and quality improvement initiatives within many business divisions of ICI New Zealand (1982-90).
• Managing the training for the implementation of ICI's first on-line computer systems, and provided internal consulting advice on processes and workgroup restructuring. (1982-84).
• As a Catholic priest, initial studies and training (7 yrs) secondary school teacher (3 yrs), post-graduate theology student in Rome and Paris (4 yrs), counsellor, and theology lecturer.

Bob's personal style, background and experience provide a basis for him to work well with others.

His clients, managers and peers have said these things about him:

• "Exemplary performance gained trust of the people really quickly, professional , with excellent sense of humour, open and honest"
• "He has a very sharp mind and strong conceptual ability, but he doesn't flaunt it"
• "His strengths in people management shine through in his support, advice and encouragement"
• "He created a safe environment where people under stress felt they could speak freely"
• "I went to him for personal advice outside the scope of his brief on this project and he really added value, I feel really comfortable using him as a sounding board"