Tina Marie Dulieu is a Business Growth Strategist and Executive Coach, founder of Coaching Dynamics since 2007. With a strategic, mathematical mindset combined with extensive experience in business and education, she specializes in inspiring senior leaders and business owners to achieve realistic, practical growth and leadership success. Known for blending strategic insight with personal support, Tina is passionate about helping clients take ownership of their roles and develop their potential. Outside of her professional life, she is happily married, a proud mother of two, and grandmother of four.
Could you elaborate on the nature of your business, highlighting its purpose and the ways it benefits people?
I am excited and inspired by working with senior people in businesses of all sizes to navigate the challenges of business growth and people development to achieve their vision of success in a realistic, practical, and proactive way. The Coaching Dynamics strapline – “Challenging You To Be Successful!” – guides my approach when asking thought-provoking questions, encouraging investigation of innovative, exciting, practical routes to business, identifying and addressing potential obstacles, and developing proactive leadership capability within their teams. My mission is to enable my clients to have clear direction, focus and achieve quantifiable success in all areas of their business. The key, and my vision, is to inspire clients to take ownership of their role and destiny, to have job satisfaction and happiness, to prosper and be profitable while growing, learning, and developing into the people and organisations they would like to be.
What inspired you to start your journey as a coach and entrepreneur? Were there any specific events, challenges, or people that motivated you to take this path?
When I look at my lifelong career since attaining a degree, although it might appear that I changed direction several times, there has been one theme that has run through the core of it all, and that is to inspire, motivate and develop people to reach their individual potential. This was true as a mathematics teacher in high school and further education, through my educational business school which I grew and sold after 10 years, and now my business coaching company Coaching Dynamics. My educational company was the first entrepreneurial venture that excited me because it combined business with mathematics; I was so excited to launch it and was proud of its huge success! This is where I learned coalface how to build, run, market, employ, deal with all the finance and nitty-gritty aspects of running a business, as well as look after my students, putting them at the centre of everything I did. There’s nothing like first-hand experience of running a business for becoming a business coach. It seemed a natural progression to go into coaching and I was particularly excited about business coaching and completed a Diploma in Corporate & Executive Coaching with Distinction and engaged in DISC Personality Profiling and Management Training courses too. Along the way I have been a Director and Board Member of two other businesses that complemented my entrepreneurial journey. I think everyone meets people who motivate them on their journey, but the one thing I have always known, and fully believe, is that the only person who could really push me to reach and attain my dreams, was myself. I was so fortunate that I had wonderfully supportive parents as a child who taught me to believe in myself and so I’ve always known that my destiny is in my own hands, and I just love that! It is probably why I am an entrepreneur at heart.
Looking back at the beginning of your career, what were the major challenges you faced when establishing yourself as a leader/coach? How did you overcome those obstacles?
In 2007, when I launched Coaching Dynamics, I already had many years of life and work experience behind me and, being a positive and optimistic person, I went into the business coaching world with great enthusiasm and the desire to work with business owners and directors in a motivational and effective way. There were two challenges that I came across and had to overcome: the first was being a woman in a relatively male dominated business sphere; the second was being petite. At business networking events, usually male dominated then, the businessmen would tower above me and it was easy to be overlooked. However, I have always been both petite and female and so I wasn’t going to let that beat me! Once talking to businessmen I met, it soon became obvious to them that not only did I know my field of expertise, but that I had the intellectual and practical ability to help them achieve their goals and vision of success. I still get a buzz when I walk into a male-dominated boardroom to know that I have their respect and ear. Of course these days, thankfully, certainly in the UK where I live, there are many more opportunities for women in business and women are more evident in the boardroom than they were. I feel proud that I made it through those challenges and was not deterred by these obstacles at the outset.
Would you like to share any remarkable achievement?
Goodness, there have been many! When teaching mathematics at high school, my GCSE class had the highest grades the school had seen with 26 of 32 students achieving A (highest grade then), leading to the most girls taking up A Level maths in the school’s history. While running my educational business, which was part of a worldwide network, one of my students won UK Star of the Year out of 55,000 students; I was so proud when he stepped onto the stage to collect his award. Through Coaching Dynamics I was especially proud to win Business Coach of the Year 2015, voted for by my own profession. Additionally, every success of my many business clients and the progression of their people feels like a personal achievement too; I am always so delighted for them!
Women are a growing force in workplaces worldwide, standing shoulder to shoulder with their male counterparts. What are your thoughts about women leadership today?
Thankfully the stigma of being female in the workplace and kept as an underling to male counterparts is not as it was. When I first left school at 18 and went to work for the BBC, women entered as secretaries only, and progression into the world of TV production, where I wanted to be, was long and arduous; I lost interest as I was so keen to progress. I realised that the only way to move up the ladder was to get a degree, which I did, majoring in mathematics. I never looked back. These days there are not these restrictions for women in the UK; fortunately, the world has moved on but women often still feel they need to ‘prove’ themselves to compete with male colleagues. Women leaders have an intuition, especially about people, that enables them to think differently and take an alternative route to get to the end goal. I would love to see more true women leaders, who embrace who they are and use their special skills to lead others forward successfully.
What message/advice would you have for future women leaders and aspiring entrepreneurs?
My advice to any woman is to believe in yourself as I did, rely on who you are, what you have and can achieve; self-belief and confidence is so important. The opportunities are out there, seek them out, make your mark and show that women leaders can and do achieve great things!
Please insert website or social media links:
www.coachingdynamics.co.uk
