Alison Hardingham, MA Oxon, C Psychol

Director of Business Psychology, Yellow Dog Consulting

Alison is Director of Business Psychology at Yellow Dog Consulting, the company which she founded in 2000.

Her areas of expertise cover the whole range of business psychology services, with the emphasis on personal, team, and leadership development.

She has consulted to an impressive range of clients across a broad spectrum of business sectors. (For example, current clients include Capricorn, KPMG, Linklaters, Fujitsu, Experian, Lloyds TSB, Atkins and the International Monetary Fund.) She also works as a Visiting Professor on Henley Business School programmes at the University of Reading . She has consulted extensively at Board level, coaching and mentoring senior individuals, facilitating meetings, and intervening to improve management team and Board effectiveness.

Public sector clients include Anglia Ruskin University, and the Medical Research Council.

Whilst Alison has skills in all aspects of management and executive assessment and development, she specialises in executive coaching, process consultancy, and team development. Alison has coached literally hundreds executives and ‘high potentials’ from a very wide range of organisations over the last ten years. Alison is a member of the approved faculty of external coaches for Lloyds TSB’s “top 120” and for Linklaters partners. She is an APECS accredited executive coach (“APECS” – the Association for Professional Executive Coaching and Supervision- is the UK’s leading executive coaching body). She is the lead tutor on Henley Business School at the University of Reading's established and successful Certificate in Coaching, a programme leading to formal accreditation which she designed.

Alison is an APECS accredited coaching supervisor, and has been supervising the work of other coaches for several years. She is, for example, the external supervisor for the internal coaching teams at Price Waterhouse Coopers.

Alison is also experienced in designing and delivering large-scale interventions (100-plus participants) which expedite strategic and/or organisation-wide change. One of her key interests is in the quality and impact of “conversation” in all its forms in organisational life, and she has spoken at several conferences on this theme.

She writes regularly for the UK HR press, and has published eight books in her field. Her latest book, “The Coach’s Coach”, was published in September 2004 and has become a standard text for many leadership and coaching development qualifications.

Alison is a regular speaker at conferences in the UK and overseas on psychological, leadership and coaching-related issues, and is also used extensively by fellow trainers and developers in their own professional development.

In 2008 Alison was ranked as ‘One To Watch’ in Human Resources magazine’s third HR’s Most Influential survey.

Alison has a son who on leaving university set up a computer games company. Family and friends, and a balanced life, are extremely important to her. She believes in continuous learning and personal growth, in the importance of genuineness, and in the pursuit of excellence.