'Alpamayo Coaching on Tour' meets Kyle Conway on dry land at HMS Sultan, for a conversation about development of self and others.

Alpamayo Coaching on Tour continues, this time with a gig at HMS Sultan, meeting up with Kyle Conway.  Followers of the tour will be thinking ‘aahhh, at last, Jeremy’s going to get on a boat!’ having heard about my visit to Becky in Southampton talking about her work at Cunard, being within touching distance of some ocean-going liners, yet not getting onto the water!  Well….once again I did not get onto the water as HMS Sultan is an amazing, huge, land base for the Royal Navy.  It’s home to three Schools whose purpose is to train Officers and Ratings in the Royal Navy in readiness to deliver on its water borne responsibilities.  The Navy’s description of these responsibilities is ‘Doing the unseen. Venturing into the unknown. Working under the radar to maintain our nation’s peace and keep food on our tables’, reminding me of the role that they have in protecting trade as well as our borders.

Kyle is not an alumnus of the University of Southampton.  Instead, he and I first met there as members of staff.  Later on, we worked together in a coaching partnership at his request.  If you are reading this Kyle, will have given his okay for me to share this as talking about a client in public without permission is as far from good practice for a coach as it is possible to get.  My interest in meeting with Kyle was the same as for all other Alpamayo Coaching on Tour gigs.  It was to swap stories with each other and offer the story of our learning to you, inviting you to see how our conversation might prompt thoughts about your own lived experience.  Visiting Kyle in 2024 was also particularly fitting as it was 10 years since we first met.  Happy Anniversary mate!

We will come to what Kyle is doing at HMS Sultan in due course.  For the first stop in our conversation, we went back the time we worked together.  Around 2013 I moved from an academic position into a leadership role in Professional Services at the University of Southampton.  Along with Rachel, I was in charge of Residential Services which meant having oversight of bricks and mortar of 7000 rooms, responsibility for providing a living environment in which students from all parts of the globe could thrive, and leadership of a large and complex staff team.  My immediate urge is to launch into the story of my own learning curve during this transition, but I’ll resist that, aside from saying that the experience was a powerful influence in my setting up Alpamayo Coaching.

A few months after I joined, Kyle was recruited to the team, as part of the night team whose brief was to support the student community out of hours.  My first impression of him was one informed by his size.  He was (and is) a big strong fella.  There are not many people I have to tilt back to look up to, and he was rather broader than me too.  Looking back, I made an assumption based on his physical presence, a central assumption being that with big physicality comes ‘big confidence’ and presence.  In fact, Kyle was quiet and for a while anyway tended not to contribute to conversations unless invited.  No question he was good at his job and a very quick learner too.  He had ambition, although found it difficult to promote his skills.  I remember this because I sat on two interview panels where he applied for roles that represented a promotion.  In the first interview Kyle wasn’t able to showcase his skills with evidence.  I gave him some feedback and in the second interview he fared no better.

After this second experience I sat him down and rather forced his hand to tell me about what experiences he had outside of work.  So it was that I found out he had an upbringing which had been challenging.  It had created within him a strong desire to give back by supporting underprivileged young people himself.  He did that for a while in the Midlands where he grew up, before meeting Charlotte and moving together to the South Coast.  Kyle had designed and run a large-scale retreat for young people in Majorca before moving on to work with young offenders, eventually working in the prison service with those found guilty of the most serious crimes.  He was father of two small children by then, AND captain of a major provincial rugby club, AND I have a memory of him talking about being busy in local politics.  This guy had a truck load of lived experience, yet there was not a whiff of it during his interview performance!  He sat on his entire portfolio, not giving it any credit in his mind as a source of skill and experience to attract the interest of other professionals.

I was not able to hide my incredulity at this and told him in no uncertain terms to start telling his real story.  We had a discussion about handshakes too!  At the next interview he absolutely smashed it, still in his big-physical-presence-yet-quiet-understated-way.  Fast forward two years, and two promotions on, and he was in my job!  Brilliant!

Just to be clear, I had moved on by that time!  I was elsewhere in the University and part of the internal coaching team.  I worked with people across the University on the back of their requests for coaching.  One such request came from Kyle and I was delighted to reconnect with him in this different sort of working relationship.  By then he was a Deputy Manager and wanted to understand how to develop his skills for the next level.  His drive for personal development was impressive as was his mix of personal ambition combined with an interest in getting to a level where he could make a bigger contribution to the development of others.  He was already doing this locally by providing training for his wider team.  His motivation was to achieve more than just improvement of someone’s skill’s set;  he wanted to raise aspirations and ensure people pursued them.  He talked about how his interest in this came from not having development opportunities in his earlier life so now he had them he was (a) going to make the best of them and (b) ensure others had access to them too.

Our coaching partnership concluded and a number of unrelated things happened.  I left the University to set up Alpamayo Coaching and Kyle got the promotion into the job I had left a couple of years earlier.  He enjoyed the greater exposure to the University while finding what he felt to be the increased distance between him and his team a little difficult.  Despite that he thrived and as he was retelling this part of the story, I recalled something that Kyle told me his grandfather used to say ‘if you don’t like a job, create one that you do like’.  I think I saw Kyle doing that in several of his jobs!

A year or two into the post Kyle was asked to manage communications and actions in relation to a change in policy which was going to be a mixed blessing to his whole team.  He remembers being at ease with taking responsibility for this, despite being aware of the likely challenge.  At the meeting where he shared the news, he remembers thinking that although difficult, the discussion had gone well.

Almost immediately he started hearing tales about how he had ‘gone over’ to the University’s side, and that he was no longer one of them.  Someone weaponised social media against him and Kyle did not feel supported by the University’s response.  All of a sudden he was alone, not able to feel part of two communities where until that moment he had felt secure.  He spent considerable effort trying to understand what had happened and to rebuild what had been in existence.  When it was clear this was not working, he made what I think is a courageous decision which was to resign, for his own and other’s wellbeing.

Kyle looks back on this as what he called a ‘switch flicking moment for me’.  He thinks of this as his first real experience of rejection from within his own team.  The label on the switch which was flicked was resilience.  For a long time now, he has felt equipped to adverse reactions from his staff and not feel them as rejection, simply an outward manifestation of what they were feeling at the time.

There is another thread of Kyle’s narrative that speaks of his drive to be continuously improving alongside his steely determination.  The thread is high performance sport and physical fitness.  For years playing rugby at a very high standard had been a core part of his life.  While I was still working with him, he sustained a sequence of knee and ankle injuries on the same leg and eventually did concede, on the back of his own research and medical advice, that he would not be playing rugby again.  However, Kyle did not accept being told that he would not run again.  This was not an aggressive, gung-ho rejection of advice but a more measured and evidence-based method, supported with medical advice.  Over the years since, he has completed not just marathons but also ultramarathons, and as far as I could make out could tell me his finishing time and position in all of them.  I had a flashback to the time when in his own words Kyle was ‘scared of talking about my talents’ and smiled at the difference between then and now.  More recently he has had a heart condition diagnosis which he talked about with candour and respect for the seriousness of his condition and the need for treatment and monitoring.  At the same time, he is looking for ways to ensure that he keeps up the physical exercise regime which is as important to his wellbeing as adopting the right level of caution.  To that end he has rediscovered a love of cycling and again can tell me exactly where he has come in some long-distance events!

Rolling back to what happened next for Kyle’s career.  He and his family were settled on the South Coast and when I asked if they had ever thought of moving for work, he just said ‘the beach is just a few minutes away from my front door here’.  No need to say anymore!  He pitched his CV into a number of applications where there was an education or an education support role.  Two positions came up, one at the University of Portsmouth and one as a programme manager of the Careers Transition Partnership (CTP), helping armed forces personnel transfer into civilian careers at the end of their term.  This fulfilled his interest in developing others, yet the work did not challenge him enough and there was little prospect of that changing.  When UoP came back with a bigger financial offer he moved to a role leading their Residences Life team.  Here he found familiar territory, yet the service delivery model was on an earlier part of the learning curve than during his time in Southampton.  He also had some reservations about the policies that he was asked to represent to his team.  Perhaps this also connected with his time in Southampton and triggered an alarm bell which he chose not to ignore.

He had a moment of regret for not staying with the CTP and then quickly got on with seeing what opportunities there were to suit his skills and aspirations.  Perhaps the CTP experience had raised his own awareness of civilian opportunities connected to working with the armed forces as when he saw an advert that invited interest from applicants with experience of the university environment, he was immediately open to the possibilities the job offered.  The role was as Support Manager with Babcock in their contracted service delivery of a huge training programme to armed forces personnel, particularly the Navy, at the land-based HMS Sultan in Gosport.

Kyle and myself standing in front of a wallpaper of Babcock's values which he was involved in drafting

There seemed to be a shift in Kyle when he told to story of his arrival at HMS Sultan as part of the Babcock organisation.  My sense was that he realised he had found a place of work that connected with everything that was important to him, and it changed him physically and mentally.

He started to lose the weight he had put on during a period where he had let his normal dedication to physical self-care take a back seat.  It was clear that he was immediately energised by having a role in the development of young servicemen.  His eyes absolutely lit up when he talked about his purpose of training armed service personnel to prepare to be the best they can be when they are deployed on active service.  Alongside this he found himself working for an organisation in Babcock which both recognised his talents and spurred him on in his own development.  Within a year of his arrival at HMS Sultan he was on an accelerated leadership programme in which his chosen challenge was to take a degree in Management with the Open University.

Whether he realised how well he fitted in with Babcock in the HMS Sultan setting early on or not, the longer-term evidence suggests that he certainly knows it now.  Five years on and he is still on a journey with Babcock.  After 3 years as Head of Training Support he spent a year in a role that exposed in more to the delivery side of the training and later on as a social value subject expert representing Babcock in their bids for future contracts for training delivery to the armed forces.

When the Contract Director post at HMS Sultan became available in 2023 he was encouraged to apply and was successful in that application meaning he now had oversight of the training delivery and delivery support involving a huge staff of academics, armed forces trainers and civil servant providers.  A brief look at the organogram was enough the convey the scale of his challenge!

It was such a pleasure to listen to Kyle as he talked about his own development at the epicentre of the development of his staff, and more particularly the trainees they all support.  Inevitably I was interested to hear about how he was ensuring that coaching support was available within his team.  This has involved following the blueprint used for so much of the training delivered to their clients.  Namely, identifying the need and then commissioning the appropriate level of training to meet the scale and competency level connected to the need.  Having created the coaching capability he is now ensuring that it is properly supported through supervision.  It certainly sounded like an effective implementation of an internal coaching programme which, in my experience, don’t always deliver as they are expected to.  A critical element here appears to be the same skill and discipline being applied to all other training components is equally deployed in creating a coaching community.

Kyle talked about picking up on the good practice of his predecessors and ensuring that he engages in regular no agenda conversations with all his direct reports.  This approach was introduced by his predecessor and Kyle has grown it and held true to not approaching the conversations with any form of hidden agenda of his own.  I would have been intrigued to be a fly on the wall in some of these conversations knowing how difficult it can be as a leader to avoid, perhaps resist, inserting your own agenda.  At the same time, I realised that I could absolutely see Kyle as being able to do that, such is his commitment to development in all that he does.

Perhaps related to this is a contribution that Kyle talked about in relation to describing Babcock’s core principles.  He was part of a global group within the organisation looking into how the company might best name and communicate them effectively.  Alongside the other five staff, Kyle is particularly pleased to have introduced the principle ‘be kind’ and advocating for its acceptance.  There was evidence of Babcock’s principles all around his office and we had our picture taken in front of a backdrop naming them too.  More importantly there was a presence of kindness in how Kyle describes how he works with other people. 

As our conversation came to a close, I reflected on the early days of knowing each other.  How, back then, his powerful physical presence which made his lack of confidence in his considerable experience and abilities, such a surprise.  Looking back Kyle remembers how ‘back then I was actually scared about talking about my talents’.  We recalled our coaching partnership and how the lasting legacy of that experience was his ability to become an effective self-coach.  I could see the benefits of this in the man sitting talking to me right now.  Big in his physical presence, yet also carrying a quiet authority and sense of assurance. 

Despite our conversation focussing on Kyle at work, it was lovely to hear him talk about how his children remind him of his past and present self.  His daughter, with her crystal-clear goal of joining the Household Cavalry, being pursued with commitment and determination, reminds him of the present day Kyle.  His younger son is a mega mathematician and talented footballer whose reticence in showcasing his talents reminds him of the Kyle of a few years back.  It is very clear that Kyle’s interest in development was just as strong at home as it is at work; this time for his children.

His changed ability to talk about his achievement is evident in his online presence too.  Some years ago, his LinkedIn profile would most likely not have noted any attributes and achievements.  His present-day profile lists them in detail…….and highly impressive they are too.  One he posted recently, was the successful completion of his degree, achieved at a first-class standard.  He set himself the target of getting a distinction in every piece of work he submitted and his comment ‘why wouldn’t you?’ is a genuine expression of his desire to achieve.

That he did so is even more impressive as he found himself facing another health challenge.  No surprise that he took this on with a combination of seeking greater understanding of the condition for himself; listening and acting on the advice of healthcare experts supporting him; adapting to his changed situation; and setting himself new stretching targets intellectually and physically.  In relation to the latter of these he has rediscovered his love of cycling and participates in long distance events with a clear intention of the times he wants to achieve and a satisfaction he is happy to share when he meets them.  All of this prompted me to reflect on how these elements of successful self-care are also essential ingredients in effective leadership: self-awareness, effective listening, adaptability, vision and goal setting, and appreciation of success.

Everything Kyle has achieved is down to himself, yet I was pleased to hear him talk about our coaching conversations of around 10 years before.  He talked about how those conversations helped him become a better self-coach.  That was music to my ears as one of my beliefs is that we can accomplish a great deal by self-coaching.  Enabling the self-coaching capacity of people is one of several ways of getting the benefits of coaching to a much wider population.  This is something of a mission of mine which I have described previously in a model I call ‘Thinking about your thinking’ (TAYT).

There is also something in this story about the influence of coaching often showing up as a tiny course correction in the way we might choose to behave.  At first the impact of this course correction might be difficult to discern, yet over time its impact often becomes much more obvious.  In Kyle’s case one element of this course correction was going from being ‘scared to talk about my talents’ to a place where he appreciates them for what they are, and makes use of them in the service of his staff, his family, and himself.  Nice one Kyle,  it was great to catch up with the story of the big guy I first met a decade ago.

Alpamayo Coaching on Tour is an experience that is all about storytelling and story sharing with people who I have shared time with in the past, either as colleagues, tutees, or coachees. If you would like to be part of the tour please do get in touch with me. My 'day job' of coaching also involves being interested in the way that other people narrate their stories. If you are interested in telling your story within a coaching partnership I will be pleased to hear from you too.