About Us
How to lead and manage teams in the 21st Century
We want a world where organisations are able to contribute to creating a sustainable, healthy, happy and productive society that works in partnership with the planet.
By helping to develop emotional intelligence skills and a flexibility of approach in management and leadership teams, we help create an environment where shared learning and collaboration accelerates change in areas that really matter.
Our Principles:
Be creativity and curious
Things work better when there is flexibly. We don’t stick to a cookie cutter format in our workshops or coaching. Each session is adapted and flexed for those present, and we encourage questions, discussions and debate. We continually evolve our own thinking, knowledge and approaches.
Encourage collaboration and shared learning
Shared experiences and learning bring more depth to exploring leadership and management challenges. We create a safe environment for all to have a voice and to share different perspectives.
Learning and development doesn’t have to be a heavy and overly serious venture, we prefer to encourage enjoyable exploration, whilst getting to the heart of the matter.
Holistic but not hippy
Real change doesn’t just happen only in your head. Balance comes from working with mind and heart. Managing and leading teams is an art and a science, theories are simply scaffolding to enable understanding.
Toby Buckle: Founder
I first became interested in leadership and management when I studied Management Science at Manchester University (UMIST). After graduating I worked my way up to a number of management jobs in different industries, learning a lot about the practical realities go the job on the way.
By 2004 I was in a senior management role and had taken many opportunities to get trained in both coaching skills and people development. I began coaching managers across the company and ran some workshops and I really enjoyed this aspect of the job.
When my mum Hazel passed away unexpectedly from a stroke in 2006 I decided to leave the security of employment and I set up Hazelbranch to focus on developing managers and leaders.
Since then I have been lucky enough to work with leaders in organisations as far afield as Tokyo, Dubai and Singapore as well as in many European cities and across the UK. I have learnt a lot along the way.
I now focus on helping charities, social enterprises, universities, public sector organisations and quangos and other more than profit organisations. I believe we need resilient, resourceful and effective leaders in organisations that make a difference.
Leaders and managers need support to perform at their best but management and leadership can be a lonely job, with few opportunities to reflect and consider different perspectives. It is easy to get tied up in the business of the day to day.
We offer the chance to talk things through, add in some research and theories to reflect on best practice, and work out a way to apply these practically. This approach can help you see things from a new perspective and look to the heart of issues in order to produce results.
I also believe in giving something back to the community and I have been a chair of trustees, sat on steering groups for social enterprise, been part of interview panels for senior appointments at Great Ormond Street Hospital, sat on the board of Brighton’s City Think Tank and donate a day a month probono to help small charities and social enterprises.
If you want to know more please click below to email.