Meet the Team

Our Mission

We don’t have a fancy mission statement; our aim is simply to help, support, enable you to realise your full potential and live the life you want. We’ll help you overcome the obstacles, the limiting beliefs that get in the way and clear the path to creating a better future. We are passionate about what we do and never forget how privileged we are to be helping you create a better life in the areas that matter most to you. You’ll find us easy to work with, honest, flexible, challenging, supportive and of course, confidential. We’ve been likened to having your own cheerleader!

Neena Sharma

Neena is a skilled and experienced qualified coach with many years boardroom experience having built her career as a Human Resources Director and Learning and Development Specialist.

With her experience of managing people and thinking strategically in a broad spectrum of commercial environments internationally, including Retail, Professional Services, Financial Services, Property, she is adept at working with teams and individuals to challenge limiting beliefs and behaviours to bring about sustainable change.

Her passion is for working with individual clients at a holistic level to improve wellness and quality of life. She puts her heart and soul into inspiring them to be their best selves, to fully connect with all their possibilities and love the life they live. Her intuitive, emotionally intelligent approach, together with her natural warmth, enables her clients to engage with their emotions, their senses, attitudes and beliefs. She has found that by firstly improving their relationship with themselves through better habits, confidence, self esteem, they are able to improve their relationships with those around them in all areas of their lives.

In addition to being a qualified coach and human resources professional, Neena is also qualified in Occupational Testing and Personality Profiling and is experienced in Mindfulness, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Neuro Linguistic Programming.

Amanda Bayliss

After many years of working in HR across a variety of different industries, Amanda recognised that not all businesses require a permanent HR function – just as long as they have access to expert support and guidance as and when they need it.

A chartered member of the CIPD, her most recent corporate role has been as Head of HR for an established and very successful professional services organisation, working with a large number of owner-managed businesses.

Experience gained across a wide range of industries including printing, manufacturing, retail and healthcare has given Amanda the knowledge, skills and flexibility to provide HR solutions in any setting. She is confident and skilled in giving practical employee relations advice, managing recruitment, retention, absence, disciplinaries, grievances, appraisals, pay reviews, as well as identifying and supporting the strategic HR needs of a business.

With a real passion for making a difference, Amanda offers a straight-talking and pragmatic approach to achieving the right people management solutions for your business. Why not book a free HR review with Amanda?

Pamela Whitehead

Pam has over 30 years’ business experience across a range of industries and professions working with both SMEs and top FTSe 100 Companies which enables her to deal effectively with a wide range of civil commercial and workplace disputes in her role as a skilled mediator. Pam applies her business acumen to offer a practical, problem solving approach to helping parties achieve a workable and sustainable agreement. Pam is also a Human Resources professional and a fellow of the CIPD. She has a wealth of experience in HR, mediation, project management, coaching and learning and development.

Pam is passionate about her work with The Prince’s Trust and is an individual business mentor, guiding young entrepreneurs in the first two years of launching their own businesses. To date, she has made a positive contribution to the lives of over 100 young people.

As Head of HR Mortgage Operations and Scottish Widows Bank, for Lloyds Banking Group, Pam was responsible for 4,500 colleagues across the UK and India. In partnership with the Operations Director, she shaped and developed the Mortgage Story which served the strategic direction of the newly formed organisation focusing on integration of colleagues and sites across all brands in the UK to form a unified Lloyds Banking Group mortgage team. During her time at Lloyds, Pam was the HBOS Head of Performance Culture and prior to that, Head of Learning and Development.

In her role as a skilled professional mediator, Pam has trained and accredited in excess of 200 mediators and delivered programmes in both the United Kingdom and internationally. Pam looks forward to working with you.

Sanjiv Corepal

Sanj is an experienced and qualified coach whose expertise extends to personal coaching, such as separation, divorce, bereavement and business coaching including high performance executive coaching. Having been a very successful CEO and worked worldwide in many highly profitable competitive corporate environments, large and small, across many diverse sectors, he understands the demands facing so many of us today.

Sanj’s core strengths lie in his ability to relate to a diverse range of people and environments, work with individuals to identify and challenge attitudes, assumptions, beliefs and values in order to increase personal growth and satisfaction.

Sanj is passionate about promoting workplace wellbeing and works with Company’s of all sizes to provide practical, sustainable wellbeing strategies. He is a qualified experienced Mindfulness practitioner and runs regular mindfulness sessions with his clients. With a strong focus on improving performance and productivity, Sanj is able to coach his clients to realise individual and corporate goals by utilising his experience, commercial acumen, personal commitment and energy.

Sanj is a dynamic coach and leader with an unshakeable belief in, and proven commitment to, maximising everyone’s potential to be the best they can be.

Carol King

Carol is an energetic and creative learning and development professional – a real people person; her passion is for developing people and helping them to achieve their full potential.

A qualified and experienced consultant, trainer, facilitator, coach and NLP practitioner, Carol specialises in management and leadership development, behavioural and team change. She has a wealth of experience coaching, facilitating,designing and delivering bespoke training solutions which support individuals and teams to achieve business and personal success and maximise performance.

Carol’s commercial experience includes heading up Learning and Development teams for both Accountancy and Legal practices where she was responsible for all aspects of people development from onboarding to senior development and executive coaching. Her design and implementation of talent management and graduate development programmes has resulted in a number of awards including inclusion in the Sunday Times Best Companies to work for list and being recognised as an Investor in People Champion.

Simon Walmsley

Simon is a highly experienced L&D Professional who specialises in Learning and Development strategy and has provided first class solutions across a variety of sectors including, retail, hospitality, financial services, healthcare and property letting.

Simon has an impressive track record of creating and facilitating dynamic leadership and management skills programmes that have achieved exceptional results within many organisations around the world. He works closely with accreditation bodies including the ILM and Ofsted to ensure all programmes meet the appropriate educational standards and accreditation.

Due to Simon’s extensive experience across multiple sectors he is able to identify and offer blended talent solutions that are tailored to the specific needs and requirements of individual organisations. From the development of On Boarding programmes to supporting senior executives in developing world class leadership skills, Simon is an expert in ensuring rapid and significant return on investment for organisations who understand and appreciate the value of investing in their people.

Simon’s strength is communicating at all levels to gain commitment, getting to the heart of the matter to provide agile robust and sustainable solutions that drive and facilitate personal and commercial success.

Leyana Akbani

Leyana is our Business & HR Management First Class Honours Graduate. With her extensive knowledge in resourcing and talent management, strategic planning and developing capabilities, Leyana is able to think strategically to move forward within any business.

Her passion for HR allows her to always ensure employees are at the heart of any business in order for the business to be successful.

As a chartered member of the CIPD, Leyana is recognised as a credible professional committed to advancing her knowledge and opportunities for the HR and L&D community.

With her course covering different aspects of HR, Leyana is confident that she is able to meet the needs of your business, from recruitment to learning and development in order for the best results.

Paul Bailey

Paul is a confident and skilled HR Director, who has worked at all levels and disciplines within Human Resources, up to and including board level HR. He has a proven track record of delivery in dynamic, entrepreneurial and highly regulated businesses, including; hospitality, financial services, retail, distribution and manufacturing.

Paul is skilled in leading change and driving engagement, particularly during business growth, transformation and re-organisation, from large scale unit opening programmes to mergers, acquisitions and business rationalisations.

His experience in leading and managing change includes successful change programmes such as, Safeway merger with Morrisons, Somerfield merger with Cooperative food, as well as him leading the Money Shop UK retail business through FCA regulation and restructuring. More recently Paul took G1 Group, a well-known Scottish hospitality company through a 2-year period of change, improving the employer brand and employee engagement.

Before his 15 years plus experience in HR, Paul had a successful career in Operations. He has worked with large blue-chip companies such as Shell UK, where he progressed to Dealer Network Manager for Scotland.

Paul is a commercially driven HR Director who can advise and support your business through change and deliver results.

Dave Leverton

Dave is a highly experienced operations director and business strategist with a proven track record of impacting business growth and success in businesses of all sizes from global matrix organisations and SME’s. Possessing a broad range of skills and leadership capability, Dave is able to set and execute strategic vision and direction across a wide range of industries, sectors and channels

Our clients regard Dave as a ‘thought leader and trusted advisor’ due to his ability to lead organisations through change. He is able to navigate across all areas of a business demonstrating consistent, clear and inclusive communication skills along with exceptional managerial integrity and empathy. He is also a highly qualified coach who naturally employs his skills into his leadership style.

Dave provides Next Steps clients with exceptional support in achieving complex and challenging business objectives and projects. He is particularly skilled in areas such as organisational change, restructuring and talent development as well as creating operational infrastructure, processes, and defining customer experience and engagement.

Dave is available to provide short and medium-term consultancy support of business projects as well as longer term contracts to fulfil senior operational roles on an interim basis, for up to 12 months.

Why not take advantage of our free HR review and see how we can help you?

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