Biography

Hilary founded Goldsmith Consulting in 1994, having developed her management skills and experience working with a huge variety of managers and organisations at IBM. She specialises in organisational dynamics – aligning organisations with their strategies, making them more effective in achieving their aims. Calling on her own thoroughly practical background, she supports a wide range of organisations to find realistic ways to achieve distinctive performance. Broadly, her work covers: leadership and strategy, organisational structures, employee engagement, organisational and cultural aspects of effectiveness and change.

Hilary has been working with ideas of organisational excellence since the late 1980’s, driven by the conviction that we all need and deserve smart and meaningful work, and smart and meaningful organisations. She has led excellence assessment and validation teams in a number of programmes, including the CAT programme for the Highways Agency. Her nose for organisational dynamics and politics gives her rapid insight into what makes an organisation special, and what makes it tick. She is author of the UK Excellence Federation’s Business Excellence Through Action (beta™) programme, a practical process for smaller companies to diagnose and improve their performance. She is currently editing the UK edition of a book on Benchlearning, a concept developed by Karlöf Consulting in Sweden combining effective benchmarking with organisational learning.

Hilary works with business leaders and senior managers in all types of organisations. As a facilitator with many years’ experience, Hilary has worked with teams across a wide range of organisations in most industry sectors, engaging in many different activities, including strategic planning, self assessment, action planning, problem solving, project definition, process redesign and benchmarking. She works with management teams and boards and with multilevel teams. She has particular experience at working with multi-organisation teams. Her role is to help the team to focus and to reach conclusions, and to address the interpersonal and cultural issues that are inherent in a disparate team. As a coach, she works particularly with business leaders and senior management teams, helping them to gel, to see issues from new perspectives, and to turn ideas into practice. She is working with a group of expert coaches in the US to develop radical approaches to personal and organisational effectiveness.

Hilary is based in Cambridge (UK, not Mass) and London, but works with clients globally. She was a Non-Executive Director of East of England Excellence through most of its life, and has supported it through a transition into the Ideas Centre, which is now flourishing. In her spare time she's a bit of a theatre nut, and she has just written three chapters of a book on dating, which is about to be published on the web.