Why work with us

Dedicated to facilitating organisational culture change through leadership development and the individual growth of people.

Bringing about sustainable, bottom-line measurable performance improvements by attacking the soft factor barriers that hold achievement back.

Vaughan Felton facilitates organisational and personal performance improvement by placing at his clients disposal effective tools, processes and education which is backed up by sound, proven change strategies and pragmatic implementation.

Vaughan has worked with over 150 organisations in Australia over the last 32 years. His clients range from the largest in Australia to the smallest covering financial, energy, water, automotive, digital media, telecommunications, healthcare, local government, gaming and publishing industries.

A sample of past and present clients include:

Vaughan Felton

Vaughan is a dynamic and inspirational facilitator and presenter as well as an outstanding performance coach. He has the unique ability to take the mystique out of the change and performance improvement process and get it bedded-down and working through a combination of pragmatic, customised implementation strategies and outstanding working relationships with his clients. He has a passion for team coaching and enjoys a fabulous reputation for creating the catalyst, the coaching and the climate in which achievement is ignited. He holds a Masters Degree in Business Coaching from the University of Wollongong.

Born and raised in Johannesburg, Vaughan began his career as a pilot in the South African Air Force. In 1984 he was first exposed to the challenges of developing high performance individuals as a flying instructor training elite candidates to operational status. In 1987 he resigned his commission to take up the position of General Manager of The Pacific Institute, a USA based company considered a world leader in the field of teaching people, individually and in groups, how to succeed. He spearheaded implementations in a wide variety of major organisations in the mining, energy, banking, insurance, and telecommunications sectors.

In 1993, he took up a position as Project Director with The Pacific Institute’s head office in Seattle, Washington, where he focused his energy in the finance, automotive, and nuclear power markets, with great success. In late 1994, the Felton family gained their long-awaitedpermanent residency status and emigrated to Australia and established the Vaughan Felton & Associates organisational transformation consultancy. Whilst Vaughan continues to work abroad in Europe and Asia, he has focused his energy in the Australian market primarily. In over 28 years of conducting business in Australia he has developed a strong, diverse client

base of over 125 clients.

Vaughan and Fiona have been married for 42 years, have daughter Danielle (married to Ben) and a son Gareth (married to Rhea) and four wonderful grandchildren - Jesse, Theo, Neve and Mila.

Our Consulting Services

Culture Profiling

In order for us to bring about culture change we need to understand the existing culture and what is causing it, define the preferred culture that we want, and then implement strategies to bridge the gap.

To accomplish this Vaughan uses a culture measurement tool called the Organisational Culture Inventory (OCI) developed by Human Synergistics, a world leader in the profiling and measurement of culture.

With over 20 years of experience using the OCI, he sets up the mechanisms to accomplish the data capture, oversees the administering and reporting of the survey, prepares the data for feedback to the senior executive group, and conducts the feedback and action planning sessions.

Following the feedback session he works with clients to develop high impact strategies that are known to bring about change in the areas of their culture that they have targeted.

Vaughan has the firm belief that if you cannot measure culture you will never change it. As a result, the OCI forms the cornerstone of all major change strategies he implements.

Leadership Development

Leadership style is researched to be one of the prime influencers of the culture of the organisation. As a result, the personal behaviours, leadership strategies, and coaching abilities of every manager become target areas in all VF culture change implementations. At the core of each implementation are three key programmes:

The Lifestyle Inventory (LSI) is a feedback mechanism that creates self-awareness by enabling managers to compare their perception of their behaviours against the perception of others and benchmark it against what is considered effective, personally and professionally.

Leadership Impact (LI), like LSI, a Human Synergistics product, provides feedback on the effectiveness of the leadership strategies a manager uses, how these strategies encourage people to behave, and the resultant impact on the culture of the organisation.

Futurecoach, a VFA product, teaches the skills and processes of highly effective coaches. It provides feedback on the impact of a managers coaching behaviours and activities whilst benchmarking them against the coaching effectiveness scores of the top 10% of coaches on record.

Each one of these programmes has a strong action planning component that facilitates the setting of a change agenda for each manager.

Personal Development

"We have built jails for ourselves with our thinking, even worse, all this time we have had the keys in our pocket."

VFA has a long history of implementing high impact personal development and wellbeing programmes that teach how the quality of our thinking impacts the quality of the lives we lead, both personally and professionally.

Concepts include self-regulation, how thinking affects performance, forethought control, self-efficacy, positive emotion strategies, and goalsetting technology.

These programmes continue to be the highest rating programmes, in terms of personal value, ever implemented in many of our client organisations.

Generically branded as the THRIVE programme, it is customised to suite the specific needs of each client organisation.

Vision Building

Vision Building is the art of getting a group of key influencers that represent the major components of the business bought into and accountable to a high-quality plan that bridges where we are today with where we want to be in the future.

The process begins with a long hard look at current reality; how the business is traveling right now, where we are relative to our goals, environmental and internal factors that influence us, and what is on the horizon in the future.

Once reality has been established we now focus on the future. This participative process begins by agreeing on the vision for the organisation; a compelling picture of the ideal result we seek. Once established we determine the mission; a bold goal that focuses effort for the next 1-2 years. This is followed by consensus on the values that will echo the philosophy of how we want to do business, our credo, a shaping force for our decisions and actions. Having now created a gap between vision and reality we conduct a scan of internal and external challenges and problems that block vision attainment; each is considered in turn and ranked based on impact using Audience Response Technology enabling anonymous input to generate an instant result.

We now begin to focus on bridging the gap between current reality and the vision by identifying the 5-6 key result areas that hold the key to our success going forward. Under each KRA we agree a set of goals with measures and targets; these goals are determined by drawing from the existing corporate plan, by establishing new goals to cover a gap identified or to remedy an issue or an obstacle uncovered earlier.

As the game plan takes shape, goal sponsors are agreed as are their responsibilities as a steward for their assigned goal going forward, this includes; establishing a goal team and with them developing the strategies and action plans with accountabilities to deliver the goal.

At the end of a highly participative and engaging process the group leaves with a well thought out game-plan for the future, one which enjoys a high level of buy-in and which focuses effort and leadership towards a clearly identified future.

Coach Training

The FUTUREcoach programme focuses on raising the impact of our coaching efforts. It is designed not only to teach effective coaching skills, processes and applications, but to also provide feedback to managers from those they coach on the level to which they apply the skills and processes, benchmarked against our data-base of coaches.

The goal-oriented FUTUREcoach method has a positive psychology theoretical underpinning and is non-directive, solution focused and performance driven. It educates the manager-as-coach on how to build a positive emotional climate in which performance thrives, how to build goal confidence, and how to build engagement and satisfaction through the amplification and leveraging of strengths.

The FUTUREcoach programme was designed and developed by Vaughan Felton and Di Burns, both holders of a Masters Degree in Business Coaching.

Conference Facilitation

40 years of experience in dealing with human behaviour, an organised mind, and a good sense of humour make Vaughan Felton an ideal conference facilitator.

He helps identify the conference objectives and then assists in the design, content, timing and flow of the event.

During the event, he is the master at getting through the agenda on time whilst hitting the desired outcomes and keeping all participants energized and engaged. He is highly skilled in managing difficult or emotional subjects and at all times ensures that the discussion remains on track and is not hijacked.

He takes every opportunity to inject his experience into the process through personal anecdote or by introducing an appropriate behavioural concept that illustrates a point. He uses a blend of being directive at times, cutting to the core of issues, asking the tough questions and then lightening the moment with razor wit where needed.

He has a keen understanding of when to control, when to facilitate, and when to blend into the background.

Planning Workshops

More and more organisations are looking for skilled facilitators that can assist them get through their planning sessions in a specific time-frame. The ability to manage the group process towards the achievement of a specific outcome in the time given is a highly skilled interaction.

Vaughan Felton has over 30 years of experience in the facilitation of planning sessions; he does not need to know the content of the discussion, just the desired outcomes and timeframes and he will assist you structure a process to get you there.

Vaughan prides himself in his ability to provide, as he put it, facili-tainment - the combination of being able to generate high quality results in an enjoyable and entertaining environment.

From a client:

"Vaughan is a unique personality to say the least, larger than life physically and metaphorically , he has the incredible ability to help large and small groups through mounds of complex issues efficiently without bogging down. He punctuates the total interaction with anecdotes drawn from his experience (often very humorous) which seem to provide the insight necessary to make decisions and move on. Most importantly, he makes you confront the issues you are there to deal with and engages each participant in a way that ensures there are no passengers. Most of all, people actually enjoy themselves whilst generating quality outputs—that requires the blend of skill, experience and personality that he has in heaps."

Testimonials

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