- maximumperformance.co.uk
- Alistair Donegan
Overview
Alistair helps organisations think and lead more strategically. He has over a decade’s experience as a facilitator, trainer and coach, working with leaders at every level — from high-potential managers to C-suite executives — across financial services, energy, pharmaceuticals, professional services, and beyond.
His work spans leadership development, strategic thinking, culture change, and communication — and he brings unusual depth to each. In 2022 he co-designed a culture change programme for a FTSE 100 energy company and spent 2023 delivering it to their leadership teams worldwide. He holds a Level 7 Executive Coaching and Mentoring Diploma (ILM) and is a certified NLP Master Practitioner. A background in performance and narrative storytelling informs both his facilitation style and his approach to helping leaders communicate with greater impact.
Before moving into learning and development, Alistair managed a software sales team and served as Sales Director for a renewable energy start-up — commercial experience that gives him a grounded, pragmatic perspective on the challenges his clients face.
Alistair’s delivery has been described as ‘warm, innovative and compelling’ (Financial Services), ‘highly credible — unlocked challenging senior leadership team dynamics’ (Pharmaceuticals), and ‘the best trainer we’ve worked with’ (Energy).
Alistair is based in London.
Qualifications and professional memberships
- Level 7 Executive Coach and Mentoring Diploma | ILM | 2023: Context, strategy, culture and processes for coaching and mentoring at a senior and strategic level.
- Certified NLP master practitioner | CTAA | 2023: Fully accredited NLP Master Practitioner
- Certified coach | Moe Foundation & the Association for Coaching | 2020: Foundational level professional coach training skills
- Certified mentor | Centrepoint | 2014: Professional mentoring training to support young people build their emotional resilience and independence
Key areas of expertise
- A coaching approach: Emotionally intelligent coaching conversations, both formal and informal, and developing the adoption of coaching habits across a workforce.
- Leadership development: Developing leadership behaviours and mindset shift at every level of organisations from graduate programmes to the S.L.T.
- Communicating with impact: on a background in performance to support and fine-tune effective delivery styles for live, virtual and hybrid environments.
- Strategic thinking and leadership: Developing the habits of mind, frameworks and practical confidence to think and operate at a strategic level, from senior managers to C-suite teams.
- The science of influence: Sharing practical tools based on behavioural science that create a solution focused approach to building and managing relationships, increasing emotional intelligence and self-awareness.
- Psychological safety: Applying a therapeutic background and essential but often forgotten interpersonal soft skills to model and co-create a psychologically safe environment.
- Effective teamwork: Sharing thought experiments, tools and techniques based on social psychology to illustrate the fundamentals of building an effective team.
- Storytelling: Coaching out the narrative of your business story, at an organisational, project, or individual level.
- Culture change: Designing and embedding culture change at scale, including the language, behaviours and leadership practices that make it stick.