Dale Kirke

Dale works as a learning and development specialist focussed on growing leadership capability, building great teams and encouraging high performance. He has designed and delivered a range of learning and development solutions specialising in the areas of leadership and management, people and performance management, interpersonal skills and team development. While at Marks and Spencer, Dale designed a series of leadership training programs to replace existing external offerings. Developing the solutions and the resources required to deliver them internally generated initial savings of £70,000 with further planned savings in excess of £150,000. Additional benefits of the program include: aligning the development of leaders across the organisation, incorporating organisational brand and values in development and total ownership of leadership assessment. Whilst at Hewlett Packard Dale redeveloped the existing new manager program from a 3 day residential course to a 6 month blended learning programme. The new program provided the feedback, development, opportunity and support needed to enable a successful transition into management which directly improved the company’s employee engagement scores and new manager retention figures. He also designed a central graduate development program enabling Hewlett Packard to successfully re-enter the graduate recruitment market providing an opportunity for new graduates to gain essential transferable skills while developing technical capability within various work-streams. Dale has designed and delivered a range of learning and development programs including: • Sessions for new and existing teams helping them to form, grow and develop according to their needs. • Performance management programs to help individuals get the most from the process and help managers evaluate and differentiate the performance of team members. • Personal career and development planning programs to help people have a clear plan for their future development needs within the organisation. He also worked on several large scale software implementations (Peoplesoft, Seibel, SAP) across Europe managing the delivery of development needs for all end users and project members. I think people learn new skills best when they are in a relaxed environment, have clarity about what they are trying to do, plenty of opportunity to put their learning into practice and detailed feedback about their progress. I try to create this kind of atmosphere when designing and delivering any learning and development solutions. Areas of expertise: • Designing excellent development programs incorporating accelerated learning principles. • Delivering learning events in a fun, challenging and business-like way. • Executive Coaching – Directors through to Team Member levels. • Facilitation of Team Events and business ‘off-sites’. • Type Dynamics Indicator Practitioner (Step 1) – a personality, team and ideal type indicator. • Certified Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) practitioner. Subject matter expertise includes: • Management Development • Coaching Skills • Communication Skills • Leadership • Personal effectiveness • Team working and development • Presentation and Facilitation Skills • Performance Management