Alex Atherton is a speaker and consultant who works with senior leaders in education and local government, helping them manage their demanding roles and achieve a better work-life balance. Having spent nearly 25 years in the public sector, primarily in senior leadership positions, Alex truly understands the pressures leaders face. Alex began his career as a secondary school headteacher at a young age, where he quickly realised the need for support. With the help of a coach, he learned to navigate the complexities of leadership and transitioned from feeling frantic to fulfilled. This experience inspired him to assist others in similar positions.
As well as being a leadership coach, Alex helps businesses address the challenges of recruiting, retaining, and engaging Gen Z, the youngest generation in the workplace. In his talks, Alex shares the solutions to ensure organisations can recruit and retain the best of this generation in any industry. He also uses his experience to teach teams how to overcome the challenges faced by intergenerational teams to help them move their organisation forwards, faster.
Recruitment and retention have been key issues for organisations for some years. Despite all efforts to date, considerable challenges remain. Gen Z is the most significant generational shift so far — inheriting an incredibly difficult set of challenges but well placed to overcome them. This talk from Alex Atherton identifies the key characteristics of Gen Z and the solutions to ensure organisations can recruit and retain the best of this generation in any industry.
Do age gaps hinder productivity, or do attempts at communication never quite connect? Are age and generation gaps an elephant in your organisation's room? In this talk, Alex examines the issues from a range of angles and demonstrates not only how to overcome them but also how to use them to move the organisation forward faster.
Senior leadership roles in the public sector are unbelievably tough. Our society needs high-quality people to do these jobs well, but there is little interest in their job satisfaction or health. People assume that senior leaders cannot have a problem given their ‘high salaries, big offices, and cushy jobs’. Senior leaders can also be poor at caring for their own development and well-being, too often aiming for survival at the cost of the outcomes they seek. In this talk, Alex describes what public sector leaders can learn from existing research and apply it to the best effect on their professional lives. He does so in the context of his public sector career and those he has worked with since.
