Enhance workplace capacity & thriving
by making good sense common practice

About Thriving Workplace

Tom Watkins

Since 1978 Tom Watkins has worked as a consultant trainer and mentor to enhance practices for leadership, facilitation, performance development and interpersonal communication.

He has a passion for supporting people to change systems within and around them to release energy for progress. Although his work is informed by continual action-research and professional reading, he believes that many of life's truths can be found in novels, more easily achieved when he can find his spectacles.

He is widely respected for his compassion for and empathy with others' challenges, and for his ability to transform good sense into common practice for significant and long-lasting improvement. He has supported capacity development and culture change with the design and delivery of in-house training programmes, group projects, 1:1 coaching and mentoring services within workplaces that include:

Tom plants trees, writes poetry that is either frivolous or earnest and sometimes both, relates well to both cats and dogs, and recommends the Scenic Route. He believes in measuring twice and cutting once, but the garden shed he built still doesn't look quite right.

He has owned a number of professional training and consultancy businesses, coached several other consultant trainers and facilitators into successful careers, authored a range of well-respected publications more earnest than frivolous and still has much to learn. Tom lives in Motueka at Te Tau Ihu o Te Waka a Maui (top of Te Wai Pounamu/the South Island) in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

An early adapter to the importance of coaching for the development of management, leadership and self-management practices in New Zealand, Tom's approach to the subject has significantly influenced many others. He offers 1:1 and group mentoring support through EncourageMentors and blogs at Thriving Matters.

Client comments include:

"Tom Watkins is a highly professional mentor who functions from a well-cemented value base. His consummate integrity and personal conduct led to a trusting relationship, essential for a successful mentor/client rapport" . . . "He has exceptional listening skills, is amazingly perceptive and has a style that instills trust and confidence" . . . "Tom brings the much needed 'soul' to management and leadership" . . . [He] has walked with me through adversity, encouraged me to explore opportunities, taught me the skills to coach and lead, and been a trusted advisor and mentor for much of my working life." . . . [He] has a wide experience of the technical skills and attributes required in senior management who has also mastered the art of management-with-heart".

David Armstrong

David is a semiretired website designer and journalist, based in Motueka, New Zealand. He has been involved in teaching, computing and medical technology since the early 1970s. In the 1980s he was a programmer/analyst developing fourth-generation languages. Before deciding to specialise in website development, he was a technology journalist at the Christchurch Press newspaper from 1991 to 2001.

In his role as a journalist, he observed not only the rapid development of the Internet during the '90s but also the problems and opportunities encountered by businesses as they try to utilise new technologies. He used his writing and editing skills to make information about complex technology accessible to a wide readership.

In 2004 he co-authored, with Dr Phil Driver, the book "Open Strategies: Liberating Collective Wisdom", which explains the philosophical and practical underpinnings of an exciting new paradigm for workplace and community collaboration.

David is the editor and publisher of the Motueka Online community website. He enjoys other interests including maintaining the garden with his wife, Val, and playing either a mean game of tennis or a gentle guitar. Sometimes the tennis is too gentle but his guitar is never mean. He also occasionally publishes his uncertain thoughts in his blog, I May Be Wrong But.

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