Executive Coaching in Birmingham
Birmingham's manufacturing, industrial and construction communities face structural pressures that conventional leadership models weren't built to handle. When prevailing approaches have stopped working and what's needed is the strategic clarity to lead differently – that's when senior leaders in the West Midlands come to John Dyson Executive Coaching.
BIRMINGHAM
BIRMINGHAM LEADERSHIP COACHING GROUNDED IN INDUSTRIAL & ACADEMIC RIGOUR.
Since 2018 I have been Professor of Human Enterprise at the University of Birmingham, where I lecture in business strategy and project management. That dual presence - working with leaders in practice and teaching at one of the UK's leading universities - gives my work here a particular depth and rootedness.
The West Midlands is one of the UK's most significant manufacturing and industrial regions. Automotive, advanced engineering and aerospace – the leaders running these operations face structural transformation on every front. Electrification, automation, global competition, skills shortages, supply chain fragility. These are not abstract strategic problems. They are immediate, operational and personal.
Birmingham also sits at the heart of a significant pharmaceutical and life sciences corridor, with growing connections through the university sector and an expanding base of biotech and life sciences organisations across the region.
HOW IT WORKS
One to one. In depth. Over time.
Executive coaching that makes a real difference is rarely quick. I work with individual senior leaders through a fixed programme of six two-hour sessions, spread across three to nine months. The first and last sessions always take place in person – in Birmingham or wherever suits the engagement. The sessions in between are in person or remote, depending on what the work requires.
The structure is deliberate. Early sessions are about understanding the situation properly – developing genuine problem clarity before moving to solutions. That often includes coming to see you in your working environment, which can reveal things that a conversation alone would not. Middle sessions move into analysis and challenge – developing approaches that are grounded in how your organisation actually works, not how it is supposed to work. The final sessions are about action, accountability and what comes next.
ABOUT ME
Built on three decades of doing the work.
My background is not primarily academic, though I have spent eight years as a professor. It is industrial. Twenty-five years at GlaxoSmithKline – ultimately as VP, Head of Capital Strategy and Design – gave me a very direct understanding of how large, complex organisations make decisions, where they lose value, and what it takes to lead effectively inside them. Before that role, as VP, Head of Global Project Management, I spent years at the junction between what organisations intend and what they actually deliver. That gap – and what drives it – remains at the heart of everything I do as a coach.
For over ten years I have also worked as a BACP-qualified counsellor. That qualification sits alongside my industrial background rather than separate from it. It gives me the ability to read the human dynamics inside organisations that most coaching and consulting approaches miss entirely. Understanding those patterns, and working with them honestly, is what separates coaching that genuinely changes things from coaching that doesn't.
My work at Birmingham – lecturing in business strategy and project management – and my coaching practice draw on the same conviction: that the most sustainably effective leaders build success on purposeful collaboration rather than individual brilliance.
WHERE I WORK
SECTOR EXPERTISE THAT RUNS DEEP IN THE WEST MIDLANDS.
The industries I work with have a strong presence across Birmingham and the wider West Midlands. My background in each is direct and substantial.
PHARMACEUTICAL & LIFE SCIENCES
Thirty years in the pharmaceutical industry – including manufacturing, capital strategy and supply chain – means I understand the specific pressures that leaders in this sector carry. The regulatory complexity, the long development timescales, the weight of knowing that strategic decisions have consequences for patients.
INDUSTRIAL & MANUFACTURING
The West Midlands is one of the UK's great manufacturing regions. The challenges its leaders face – automation, decarbonisation, global competition, skills shortages – are exactly the structural pressures I work with. My work with Design to Value, and my experience at GSK leading capital strategy across complex industrial programmes, gives me a direct understanding of what those pressures look like from the inside.
CONSTRUCTION & INFRASTRUCTURE
Birmingham is undergoing significant infrastructure investment and urban development. Leadership challenges that come with complex, long-lead projects – maintaining value from concept to delivery, managing stakeholder complexity, building the trust that makes large delivery organisations actually function – these are the challenges I understand best.
WORKING ON SOMETHING GNARLY?
My professorship at the University of Birmingham gives me a particular connection to this city and the organisations within it. If you are a senior leader here facing a challenge that requires both strategic and personal clarity, I'd welcome a conversation.