CASE STUDIES

Deloitte is one of the “Big Four” accounting organisations and the largest professional services network in the world by revenue and number of professionals.

Shola was asked to travel to India to deliver a 4-hour management training session on How to increase Empathy in the Workplace

Shola’s workshop was delivered to a room full of technical managers during a two day offsite session on empathy and emotional intelligence. She was sought out after the Learning and Development team saw her TEDx talk on the same subject.

During the session, attendees learned why empathy is so important, were presented with a business case for increased empathy at work, and Shola shared personal stories on the impact of lack of empathy in the office.

  • Third party content included quotes and footage from Brene Brown to Maya Angelou and Gary Vaynerchuk.
  • Shola shared a simple framework that all managers could use to help them become more empathetic.
  • In this highly interactive session, the group also participated in a listening workshop and a variety of situation based role plays.

After the session, 93% of participants reported that their listening skills had improved and 82% shared that their empathy skills had improved.

Feedback included:

‘Excellent, practical, methodological, interactive and insightful.’

‘An eye-opener for me. I exercise empathy often however, I considered it more of a nice to have. Now I realise the importance of it in our day to day lives.’

‘Excellent. Relevant examples which resonate with the day to day life of a manager.’

‘Really good. The role plays were pretty close to the scenarios we deal with.’

The Financial Conduct Authority is the conduct regulator for 59,000 financial services firms and financial markets in the UK and the prudential regulator for over 18,000 of those firms.

Shola was asked to deliver the community of practice keynote for their architecture and operations group.

Shola delivered a bespoke version of her most popular keynote, INFLUENTIAL: transforming technical know-how into leadership skills using the power of communication

The FCA opened up the keynote to the entire business as they felt the topic would be of great interest, and were happy to note that they had outstanding attendance at the talk. Afterwards, there was much unsolicited feedback from attendees saying how they benefited from the talk and requesting the bonus training materials that Shola had made available.

Feedback from the FCA:

Shola hosted our event yesterday, ‘Translating Technical Know-how into Personal Impact’ and she did a fantastic job.

Shola was organised, confident and delivered an extremely engaging speech. We had around 120 delegates who were mainly from the technology department who are usually very reluctant to get involved with interactive events/speeches.

Shola managed to get the whole room engaged and talking to each other which was wonderful to see. Her engaging speech and confident delivery meant that she gained the trust of her audience almost immediately.

I would highly recommend Shola and will be passing Shola’s details on for anyone who is looking for a speaker for similar events at the FCA.

L.O.C. are an independent marine & engineering consultancy based in London, with offices globally

Shola was asked to be the inaugural speaker at their Inspiring Speaker talks in the London Office. Her talk was called How to communicate for personal impact: step up, speak up and influence!

L.O.C. has many engineers and technical staff. After speaking to the global head of HR, we decided to create a talk that was part inspiring story and part interactive communications and influence training. The learning goals were to help attendees with: concise communication, impactful storytelling and discovering ways to influence colleagues effectively.

The meeting room was packed to full capacity with not a single seat free. One attendee who had said she would need to leave early to attend her lunchtime spin class was so engrossed that she had to stay for the full session. Everyone participated in the exercises and there was a lively discussion around how best to employ the new tools they had just discovered.

After the training, 90% of respondents felt their communication skills had increased by at least 20%. The MD shared that he had enjoyed the interactive session, and unsolicited feedback declared the training ‘important, useful and inspiring’.

L.O.C. Global Head of HR, May MacInnes