Testimonials:

If you want to change the way you look at situations talk to Craig at Rambutan. If you want to change and motivate your team talk to Craig. If you want everyone’s voice to be heard talk to Craig. ‘Let me play that back to you’ takes on a whole new meaning along with, ‘this is what I heard.’ Craig used real life experiences and situations to make me an effective manager. If you want to change the way you look at your team, Rambutan can help. Craig, I thank you for so many things on this journey but most of all I thank you for making me the manager I was always supposed to be.
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With support from Rambutan we wanted to bring to life, true cultural change with our Civility Saves Live programme. Rambutan has been instrumental in developing and delivering online and face-to face sessions on Civility Saves Lives interventions for clinicians, managers and all other staff. These interventions have truly affected a change in behaviour among our people, who now fully recognise their role in improving civility and culture at The Trust and how this can, and has, positively impacted patient outcomes.
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I have been working with David in spells, for nearly 5 years now, and he has played such a significant role in my professional development and growth – but in a way that bleeds across to life in general. He has a style that challenges in the right places and adopts techniques that feel unique to the objectives you want from the engagement. I would recommend David to any aspiring leader or established Exec. looking for someone to put a mirror up to themselves and find the next level they can achieve.
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David has created a team at Rambutan who are engaging, insightful and commercially focused. They’re values-led and bring authenticity and creativity to their approach. They are great fun to work with – driven to achieve the best outcomes, and work with passion and integrity.

As a coach, David expertly creates a relationship that’s both challenging and supportive. He ensures clarity against objectives and uses robust frameworks enabling you to explore your situation, thoughts, feelings and opportunities – and ultimately develop a plan that you’re accountable for delivering. And he’ll check-in to make sure you’ve done what you said you’d do! I’d recommend working with David and his team to support both individual and organisational development.
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If you need someone to help bring out your best leadership qualities, go to David. New into a senior position after a promotion, I wanted to set myself up for a smooth transition and was fortunate enough to be put in touch with David. I’d never worked with a coach before, and despite the remote restriction, David made me feel comfortable throughout. In two sessions we’ve covered a lot; stepping up to manage peers; pitching me the leader and my ideas, how my personality can help and hinder me at work (I thought I knew myself pretty well but there was a bit of a revelation in here!); what makes someone credible; how to deal with losing a boss who’s been a big support. I would 100% recommend David. His manner is easy, you can take things in any direction you’d like, he provides useful frameworks or ways to think about things a bit differently. He also shared book synopses around topics I’m particularly interested in for me to digest outside of our sessions. Without David I wouldn’t be as focused on longer-term goals, I’m consistently thinking about things from the other person’s point of view, I’m giving better feedback and I’m coaching my team more. I’m, without a doubt, a better leader, doing a better job because of him and will very likely work with him again if he’ll have me.
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We, at RHP, partnered with Rambutan to design bespoke sessions on problem-solving and decision making. Not only did they listen to our needs, but they were also helpful in suggesting various approaches we may wish to consider. The delivery was very engaging and the feedback from employees was extremely positive. Many of them have since shared their experience of using the content of sessions in their roles and how this has supported their teams.

Rambutan has also kindly supported some of our employees with a series of webinars to support them working from home and adapting to the new reality of the workplace. These were insightful, challenging perceptions and habits, and included interactive activities. Craig and David made the sessions snappy, focused and interesting.
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What can I say? – thoroughly professional and an amazing personal style that engenders trust – David has that rare skill – he listens! My discussions with David made me reflect and consider the way I was approaching work and life for that matter. Thoroughly enjoyable too which is always a bonus!
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Working with Rambutan enabled us to bring a few fragmented ideas together into a clear vision that truly aligned with our goal to help people experience a coaching culture. From the vision came the reality – a learning experience for our people that made a true difference on the day and became an ongoing catalyst for change. You can visually see the changes in individuals, in teams and in the culture as a result.
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Rambutan was instrumental in helping us interpret our employee engagement survey data which enabled us to focus very quickly on the things we needed to do to improve engagement. Their guidance and support, through company workshops and facilitating senior team meetings helped us articulate our vision and strategy into a straightforward narrative that an amazing 94% of employees now understand. Sharing the company strategy in this way has proved invaluable and has driven engagement positively across the organisation.
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I worked with David after promotion into a senior leadership role. It was my first experience of coaching and I wasn’t sure what to expect. It has been brilliant. A really honest, supportive and challenging relationship that has definitely helped me step up into the role and lead change in an otherwise conservative and male-dominated industry.
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Our senior leaders’ event had lots of ‘firsts’, including being our first large and truly collaborative virtual event. Over three, half-day sessions Rambutan created a fast-paced, engaging event that visibly developed our capabilities as the sessions progressed. Rambutan met our challenging brief, remaining agile throughout to accommodate the real-time feedback we provided.
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Executive coaching is a fantastic opportunity but I don’t mind admitting to being a little unsure of what to expect and how the sessions would take shape. My first meeting with David put my mind at ease; I took to him straight away. He has an easy manner but also seemed to develop a clear understanding of me as a person very quickly. The sessions are two hours long and they fly by! It’s difficult to articulate in a few lines exactly how David has helped me develop my leadership style but he got me thinking about my career, my abilities and what I wanted for myself from angles I’d never stopped to view myself from. It really has been an eye-opener!

Whether intentional or not he has given me the confidence I needed to take the next step and it’s no longer the giant leap I first imagined. I’ve just recently been promoted to Director and my sessions with David over the past 6 months have really helped prepare me for the role! If you’re lucky enough to get the chance to work with him, do it!
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We, as leaders of the finance departments within the University of Nottingham, have been leading our teams through a people, culture and engagement journey. We felt, as part of that journey, it was really important to start capturing our teams’ thoughts, feelings and very personal experiences of the challenges faced during lockdown. We commissioned Craig from Rambutan to work with us on this really critical piece of work. We had no idea how our teams would respond to sharing their personal experiences in a virtual workshop environment but Craig had a really fantastic way of making our people feel relaxed and very comfortable. He made the space in which they were communicating feel very safe.

As a result of this, our people opened up completely and have shared the most amazing and personal experiences with good grace, humour and a real passion and commitment for concern and care towards each other. I can honestly say that Craig was the key driver for such open and fantastic conversations and our teams really connected and engaged with his humour and style. This was such an important piece of work for us and Craig was completely bought into that and worked tirelessly to make sure every team member was involved and had their say. I and my colleague are delighted with the results and cannot wait to start building the teams’ feedback into our finance journey.
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We had planned some leadership development sessions with David before the lockdown and I was keen that we continued with them – particularly in light of the ‘new normal’ that we were trying to navigate through. We decided to use Zoom and it worked really well. Being able to ‘see’ everyone and also to go off into mini sessions with different people meant that I could maintain contact and relationships with the team and also notice body language and facial expressions that you can’t pick up through a conference call.
This was a great way of maintaining momentum in our leadership journey as well as providing additional support in strange times!
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I had a series of coaching sessions with David to help with my presentation and verbal communication style. I found them incredibly helpful, hitting the objectives we agreed at the start with plenty of very practical lessons to learn. Although the sessions took me out of my comfort zone several times, they were always enjoyable. David has a huge wealth of knowledge and was engaging, challenging and supportive throughout the time we worked together.
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We chose to work with Rambutan on the development of a leadership behaviour framework after meeting with Craig and David; having been impressed by their creative energy, the evidence that they had really listened to our brief and the bespoke tailored approach they promised. We have not been disappointed! Craig and Lance quickly gained a great understanding about our organisations and our people, and their experience, enthusiasm and fantastic coaching-style approach has resulted in the creation of a framework that we are confident meets the needs of our councils – reflecting what our people think it should be and what it feels like to work here.

As our account lead, Craig has always been available whenever we’ve needed to touch base, and he’s given us nudges along the way with ideas and support to help keep us on track.
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David supported the Executive Team at Nest Pensions during a period of restructuring. He was an excellent coach and facilitator for the team. We all trusted and respected David and emerged from our sessions a stronger and more cohesive Exec Team and better leaders. The great thing is that David combines very strong practical experience of leadership and management (he has been there himself) with a superb grasp of theory. David is sensitive and creates a safe space to have difficult conversations but he never ducks issues.
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Craig got in contact with me following the collapse of Thomas Cook and whilst he initially offered support to me personally, he very quickly turned his offer into a classroom-based session. This meant we could open up the training to 35 similarly impacted employees who were entering the job market, many for the first time for a number of years. The feedback I’ve had from the team is that they really enjoyed his training, which was based around making the best of your personal self whilst job hunting. He was very engaging and funny, which helped in the difficult situation we were in, and everyone in the room learnt something. A couple of people have since been on other similar courses and advised that they learnt more from Craig. I would highly recommend him in any training environment. He has a great ability to put people at ease, and get them to open up and participate.
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We partnered with Rambutan for our two on-boarding days (pre-opening), to help ensure that they were smooth and successful with over 80 people attending each day. Rambutan’s approach and skills to help organise the logistics and content for the many different areas and topics was fantastic, and by no means an easy task! Following on from this, we also held a small management workshop to review our progresses to date, as well as set goals and priorities for the months ahead. This was a very helpful half day which ensured the management team were aligned to the company’s vision and also aware of each departmen’ts focus points. Rambutan are a very flexible company to work with and very capable of creating something bespoke to your needs. I would not hesitate in recommending them to others.
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Craig is one of the most positive individuals I’ve come across and a pleasure to have around. Whilst I’ve known him for a number of years I recently engaged him to partner with a client to help us launch a new approach to appraisals. For this to be successful we needed to embed a coaching culture and Craig and his colleagues at Rambutan have played a key role in supporting us on this journey. As a Learning and Development specialist and strategist he is second to none.
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