FAQs

I’ve now spent over 25 years coaching, training, and mentoring leaders at all levels. I started doing this in the British Army, then moved on to a number of senior HR and learning and development roles in the corporate world before setting up Ben Morton Leadership back in 2013. Since then, I’ve delivered leadership training all around the globe to everybody from first-line managers right up to executive leadership teams in FTSE 100 companies. I’ve done this with some amazing clients, including people like Samsung Electronics, Google Eon, Cytiva, and NetworkRail to name just a few.

In addition to having 25 years’ experience leading teams in the military on expeditions all around the world and in the corporate world, I’ve continued to study to really master my craft. 

I’m a level seven executive coach and leadership mentor with the Institute of Leadership and Management. I have a diploma in applied neuroscience and behavioural change. I’ve studied brain-friendly learning extensively, and I’m also accredited and certified in numerous psychometric and personality profiling tools. And on top of that, I am what I describe as positively restless. I’m always looking to learn new things and find those small little tweaks to make the programs I deliver and the coaching sessions I run even more impactful for the people I work with. 

Yes, absolutely.  

 Face-to-face training is always my preferred option and the one I advocate to clients just because it provides a much richer and more transformational experience for your people. That said, we’ve now got a world-class virtual studio, which means we can deliver online programs that are nearly as good as the face-to-face ones I deliver. And, on top of that, there’s also the blended approach where we might have a series of in-person sessions supported by some short online group coaching sessions to really help people stay focused and transfer the learning into the workplace. 

Everything I do and every program I create is firmly rooted in the principles of brain-friendly learning and how adults actually learn. It’s actually easier for me to tell you what you won’t get when you partner with me. There’ll be no pour-and-snore or death by PowerPoint. 

Most of the training is done live with flip charts, even in virtual workshops. 

There’s no awkward role-play exercises. Most people hate it, and it’s not conducive to effective learning.  

You won’t get me lecturing from the front of the room as the sage on the stage. The sessions are highly interactive and typically involve me speaking for about 30% of the time, and the group talking for the other 70. 

There’s no random energisers or games. Instead, the energy and the focus come from smart outcome-focused design. Or, to put it another way, the sizzle is in the substance. We won’t have your people building bridges out of spaghetti or clambering over planks and barrels. It’s just too abstract, and again, it’s not conducive to good, effective learning. And finally, we won’t be exploring random case studies that have got nothing to do with your business. What you will get is a highly interactive program where everything that we explore is related directly and immediately to your business, your people, and the unique challenges they’re facing. 

Yes, absolutely. It’s really common for me to work closely with you to explore your organisation’s values or your leadership framework and then look at mapping that directly to the right tools, methodologies, and ideas in order to develop your leaders. I also focus very heavily on trying to understand the unique challenges of the organisation and the starting point for the people I’m going to be working with. What this does is it enables me to provide the right leadership tools and to immediately relate everything that your people are exploring directly to their real-life challenges. 

Yes, absolutely. I’m a Level Seven Executive Coach and Leadership Mentor via the Institute of Leadership and Management, and I’m also trained in numerous psychometric profiling tools. This could be pure coaching for your people before, during, or after the program. It might include some sort of psychometric profile, such as strength, scope, or a resilience-based profile that we can look at and explore before the program and then build into the live training sessions that they attend as groups. So, there are numerous coaching and mentoring options that you can build into a program. 

I pay as much attention to what happens before and after a workshop as I do to what happens when your people are with me in the room. The resources that come after a training program are what I refer to as a Set–down Pack. This typically involves a PDF document that includes all of the flip charts we’ve created live together in the room, plus any key slides I’ve used. There’ll be links to articles and books that I’ve referenced that are going to help your people. I’ll include podcast episodes, some that I’ve recorded myself and others that are relevant to the content we’re sharing. And, on top of all of that, there is a series of on demand online courses that your people could have access to covering things such as delegation and forward planning. 

This one is easy. Two of my Significant Seven Strengths are personal development and developing others. And if anything, this is a strength I can overplay if I’m not careful. Every year, 10% of my profit goes straight back into my own learning and personal development. And this typically involves things like attending conferences, going on new training courses, reading, and listening to podcasts. But what’s really key for me is to make sure anything that I’m then teaching and sharing is relevant and serving a purpose as opposed to just being something that’s new, shiny, and the latest fad in terms of leadership and management. 

I’d normally take the lead from you on this one. Of course, the starting point is the good–old level one analysis or Happy Sheets. And beyond that, my advice would be to focus on the measures that already exist in your business or whatever the measures are that led you to invest in some leadership development. For many clients, these typically tend to be things like company engagement surveys, maybe your employee net promoter score, or employee turnover figures. 

I deliver all of my best results when clients think of me as an extension of their team. And this really enables me to work closely with you to understand your organisation and the outcomes that you’re looking for. What I’m talking about here is diagnostics, and that simply involves things like me speaking to various stakeholders in the organisation, reviewing any materials that you might have, such as your leadership framework, values or engagement surveys, and then speaking to people who might be coming on the program to understand their starting point and any hopes and fears they might have for the program. And then once we’re up and running, my expertise and experience means that I can easily adapt to the program as it’s unfolding, even changing content and exercises live in the workshop itself. 

My online virtual programs are designed using exactly the same principles of brain-friendly learning as my live workshops. My TV–grade virtual studio means that I can easily switch between different camera angles at the press of a button. I can go from training in front of the flip chart to sharing key slides with the group. On top of that, we’ll have regular breaks so people can step away from the screen to rest their eyes. And, again, as in any live workshop that I run, there are numerous breakout sessions, either in groups, in pairs, or even time for people to step away from the screen and complete some personal reflection and planning. 

12 to 18 is the norm for most courses, although we can go smaller or much bigger depending on the audience and the specific outcomes you’re looking to achieve. 

There’s no set curriculum for the programs that I deliver. Instead, I focus heavily on getting to know you, your organisation, the challenges you’re facing and the outcomes you’re looking to achieve. That said, with years of experience, I can pull on different blocks of content, tools and tactics that I know are going to help you. In addition to that, everything that I do is based on the core belief that our job as leaders is to support, develop, and look after the people we’ve got the privilege and responsibility to lead so that they can deliver the results we’re accountable for. I also like to focus heavily on helping people understand what it truly means to be a leader, the type of leader they want to be, and their core values. This means they can select the right tools and adapt other tools to enable them to be the most authentic leader they can possibly be.