James Caplin, Head of Coaching

James is a coach who is passionate about helping people, teams and organisations to transform themselves in order to create excellent and sustainable results.

After graduating from Trinity College Cambridge with a degree in English, he discovered he had a talent for communicating with people in the workplace to help them raise their game. He became one of the UK’s most successful writers and producers of video-based training materials, working for, amongst others, Citibank, IBM and the DFES. During this time, he also co-authored a best-selling book that changed the way we garden (Instant Gardening Chatto &  Windus 1990): wrote a regular gardening column for the Times on Saturday magazine; and led a community group that transformed the area he lives from being dominated by an on-street drugs and sex-market into part of what estate agents now refer to as ‘Notting Hill’.

In 2002 he discovered coaching. In 2008 he became one of only 74 in the UK to reach the International Coach Federation’s Professional Certified Coach level. He was on Coachville’s faculty (the largest provider of coach training on the internet) and published a book helping people to radically change the way they think about, prepare for and do presentations (I Hate Presentations Capstone 2008). His unique approach has twice formed the basis of articles in the Financial Times.

He is now our Head of Coaching, helping clients to realise their workplace ambitions. He also delivers extremely successful and popular workshops for us on subjects around communication and influence, two of the key skills-sets IT executives require on their journey to business leadership.