From the Diary of Victoria Buckenham

For the HR director who has just been asked to fix a leadership problem with a training budget, a different way to spend it.

An organisation notices that its leaders aren’t giving feedback, aren’t asking the right questions and aren’t thinking strategically. The diagnosis arrives quickly: a skills gap. The remedy arrives just as quickly: a course. A cohort goes through it, and the problem stays where it was.

The number of leaders in that position is not small. In 2023 the Chartered Management Institute, working with YouGov, found that 82 per cent of people entering a management role had received no formal management or leadership training.

Victoria Buckenham has watched the pattern from both sides of the desk. “I think they believe the problem is a skills gap, so they ‘buy training’ to solve the problem, but the reality is that going on ‘courses’ isn’t how humans learn!” she says. “I see organisations time and again try to solve a single problem, when the reality is more about mindset shift and behavioural change at organisational level. Mostly this is leadership and management skills, rooted in the fact that leaders often haven’t been taught how to lead.”

She’s the founder of VB & Associates, a Worcester-based firm that delivers executive coaching, leadership development and talent programmes to organisations, and advises them on their people, talent, succession and development strategies. She spent fifteen years inside organisations like theirs, running talent and succession functions, before she coached anyone from the outside.

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Brilliant People, Brilliantly

VB & Associates was set up in October 2020. “Working with a carefully-selected team, we deliver impactful team days, facilitated workshops and talent development programmes for everyone from grads to executive teams,” as Victoria puts it on her profile. The firm’s tagline is shorter: “We develop brilliant people, brilliantly.”

The inside experience isn’t hers alone. “All of my team have the same,” she says, and together the team has over 300 years of talent and development experience. The firm works with clients at enterprise level, on talent programmes, leadership programmes, large coaching programmes and cultural and behavioural change, and with individuals, and she doesn’t rank one above the other, because “people are at the heart of what we do.” What’s changing is the capacity to bring the enterprise-wide work to more clients at once. “Right now I am continuing to scale VB & Associates into a firm that can deliver enterprise wide development and cultural / behavioural change, not just one leader at a time,” she says. The belief underneath it is stated in the firm’s mission: “At VB&A, we believe that everyone is talent, and that talent development should be accessible to all.”

Seven of the fifteen years she keeps returning to were spent in one organisation.

Fifteen Years Inside Organisations

Victoria spent seven years at npower. Over that time she was responsible for talent management and development, performance management, coaching and mentoring, and management and leadership development, and she eventually took the role of Head of People Development, led the People Development team, and setting the people development strategy of the business. She was part of the HR Leadership Team and, in her words on her profile, “one of few women within the npower Top 50 Executives.” Her twins were born during those years, too.

In October 2020 she founded VB & Associates. Alongside the firm she’s a Mental Health First Aider, and she describes herself on her profile as “obsessed with the richness that comes from psychometrics,” accredited to use a range of tools so that the right one can be matched to the client’s problem.

The psychometrics matter to how the firm works, and one recent engagement shows why.

A Senior Team That Thought It Was Working

A national organisation came to VB & Associates believing its senior team was fully functioning and high performing. What the firm found once it started working with the levels two and three below them told a different story. Communication was breaking down well before it reached the people actually delivering the work.

The response was to go back to the most senior team and help them see their own blind spots, using psychometric testing to show how they were performing both as individuals and as a team. “The data made the reality hard to argue with, and it meant some difficult conversations,” Victoria says.

“Their blind spots were not staying contained at the top, they were driving performance issues much deeper in the organisation.”

Victoria Buckenham, Founder, VB & Associates

A follow-up engagement survey later showed not just a higher response rate but, in her words, “genuinely higher trust in leadership, because people were seeing their leaders actually try to shift patterns that had sat unaddressed for years.”

That follow-through is the part of the work she thinks sets her apart.

“The thing I do that most people in my field do not is stay in the room after the insight lands. A lot of coaching stops at the ‘aha’ moment whereas I think mine starts there.”

Victoria, Founder, VB & Associates

The question that opened that engagement is the kind she puts to her own network most weeks.

The Questions Go Back Out

Scroll Victoria’s LinkedIn feed and you’ll find lots of content, but most recently she asked a series of coaching questions to her followers, running as polls. How do you currently check in with yourself on progress? What’s most likely to get in the way of your Q4 goals? As you head into the last four months of the year, what matters most to you at work? The answers come back from her network, and the next post asks what they’ll do about it.

“Via LinkedIn (and direct work with clients), I put my own coaching questions back out to my network instead of answering them myself,” she says. “It looks like a small thing, but it is actually very deliberate.” The same instinct produces what she calls experiments or moves. “I also like to offer practical ‘experiments’ to my clients and followers, as I firmly believe that it’s little intentional acts of growth that create longer term impact. I think I am known for these little types of strategic ‘rapid prototyping’ experiments or moves: try something, see if it works, and if it doesn’t, try something else to see what sticks.”

The habit has a principle behind it, and it’s the line she most wants to own.

“The leaders I trust most are not the ones with the most answers. They are the ones asking the best questions, of themselves first.”

Victoria, Founder, VB & Associates

Asking of yourself first is also where her thinking on leadership starts.

Bringing Your Whole Self to Leadership

The advice Victoria gives to anyone starting out as a coach is the same thing she wants from the leaders she works with. “Don’t be afraid to bring your whole self to it,” she says. “I think there is a tendency, especially early on, to want to be a cookie cutter version of what a coach or a talent expert should look like, and that is true in any walk of life, not just this one. What I have learned is the opposite is true. Your own lived experience, the ups and downs across your professional and personal life, is not something to keep separate from your work. It is what makes you good at it.”

She practises it. “I do not shy away from sharing my own stories, particularly around resilience, and what that gives me is a real sense of connection with my clients,” she says, and she adds one thing for anyone following her into coaching: “understand the ethics and the fundamentals of coaching properly, that matters.” For the leaders she coaches, the same idea comes down to four words: “Vulnerable leaders are the most impactful.”

Where Victoria Is Now

This year the firm is growing on purpose. “We’re deliberately building the VB&A Team out with 12 new hires this year,” Victoria says, “so we can now more readily scale for our clients to have even more impact.” Alongside this growth, Victoria is becoming accredited as a Coach Supervisor, “something I’ve wanted to do for a long time,” which she sees as a way to have a bigger impact on the coaching community itself. Her one-word summary of what’s next is ‘growth’.

The people she most wants reading this are HR Directors and Chief People Officers, the decision makers who decide whether this sort of work happens at all. VB & Associates works with organisations of all sizes and has experience across geographies and sectors.

Outside work she’s a mum to ten-year-old twins. “Their premature entrance to this world shaped who I am today both personally and professionally,” she says. “I also passionately feel that being a mum helps me to be an even better worker, and vice versa. I love working and I love being a mum!” She’s an adventurer at heart, too. “As a family we love travelling and exploring the world, going to places that most people wouldn’t consider a family destination!” She thinks it plays out in the work: innovation, adventure, diversity of thought, and not being afraid to go there in difficult conversations.

Her advice to someone starting out is also the line to leave her on. “Never lose sight of the fact that who you are is not a distraction from the work. It is the thing that will make you exceptional at it.”

Five Reflections from Victoria

Is it a skills gap, or a pattern? Before signing up to a training course, ask whether it’s one specific problem or a mindset / behaviour shift the whole organisation needs.

What are you waiting to feel sure about? Most people wait to feel sure before they act, and the leaders she trusts most act on the clarity they already have.

Are you asking the best questions of yourself first? The leaders worth trusting are rarely the ones with the most answers.

Where are the blind spots doing their damage? What sits unaddressed at the top rarely stays there, and data the team can’t argue with is often what opens the real conversation.

What small thing could you try this week to further your career or get you closer to your goals? Experiment! Try something, see if it works, and if it doesn’t, try something else to see what sticks.