phone: +44 (0)24 7657 5762

email: Bob.Thomson@wbs.ac.uk

room: 3.133

Profile

Professor Bob Thomson is a Senior Tutor for final year undergraduates at WBS, and a Personal Tutor for the WBS Foundation Year programme.

He is an experienced coach and supervisor of coaching, and is accredited as a Senior Practitioner Coach and as a Supervisor by the European Mentoring and Coaching Council. He also acts as an internal mediator, helping members of staff in conflict with one another to find a way forward that will resolve their difficulties.

He set up and ran the Warwick Leadership Programme for academics, administrators and commercial managers, and the Warwick Administrative Management Programme. He established the University of Warwick's Certificate and Diploma in Coaching. Before joining the University Bob worked for eleven years as an economist with British Steel and ICI, and then for seventeen years as a management development professional with British Gas, Transco and National Grid.

 

He has qualifications in management learning, counselling, coaching, supervision of coaching, and mediation, and is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

 

Details are also available at Bob's WBS homepage: http://www.wbs.ac.uk/about/person/bob-thomson/

 

Research Interests

Coaching and mentoring. Leadership and management. Experiential learning.

 

Publications

Bob has written a number of books on learning from experience and on coaching:

• Growing People: Learning and developing from day to day experience
• Don’t Just Do Something Sit There: An introduction to non-directive coaching
• The Coaching Dance: A tale of coaching and management
• Non-directive Coaching: Attitudes, Approaches and Applications
• First Steps in Coaching
• Understanding Yourself and Others: Practical tools from the world of coaching
• How to Coach: First Steps and Beyond

'Don’t Just Do Something Sit There' was published in Chinese under the title, which reflects the notion of Socratic questioning, Modern Midwifery: the art of coaching.

He has also published two book chapters:

• Non-directive supervision of coaching in Supervision in Coaching, edited by Jonathan Passmore
• Coaching in higher education: a case study in Coaching in Education, edited by Christian van Nieuwerburgh