Mark Fourman is accomplished in coaching individuals to increase performance; in developing leaders to manage challenging organisational changes; in leading organisational development projects to improve organisation effectiveness; and in designing and delivering high-impact, results-oriented training programs.
Sample projects include working with GreenPages Technology, Inc. (GreenPages), a B2B computer equipment reseller, which ranked #36 on Inc. Magazine’s list of fastest growing US companies. The company's team leaders lacked the skills and experience necessary to efficiently and effectively manage their growing organisation. Mark Fourman guided the company in handling these challenges in sustaining their growth.
Mark also developed a leadership and communication training program, which had such a great impact on performance that the CEO made it mandatory for all employees (from the CEO himself down to the mail room staff). The quality of communication throughout the company improved radically. New decision-making processes and structures were created that allowed the company to respond to the rapidly-changing internal and external environments quickly and efficiently. organisational alignment and buy-in improved so that new decisions and policies could be implemented rapidly.
Mark has also been integral in supporting companies in building key partnerships. The Director of Industrial Relations at a mining company was nearing retirement. He prided himself in being a hard-nosed negotiator who aggressively fought the unions in every negotiation. However, the new president of his company had decreed that henceforth they would have partnership relations with all stakeholder groups – including the unions and employees. The Director of Industrial Relations knew that he did not have partnering skills and was resigned to ending his career on a failure rather than a success.
With Mark's coaching, the director realised that he could turn the situation around. In addition to changing his own attitudes and expectations, he hired our team to develop and roll out a Principled Negotiations program designed to shift the management-union negotiations to a win-win framework. First we delivered the Principled Negotiations training to the mine managers and industrial relations representatives. Once they were on board with the new mindset and skills, we delivered the same training to groups of managers and union representatives together. Since then our team has been facilitating the contract re-negotiations every three years. We are coming up on the ten-year anniversary and the negotiations are still succeeding in producing win-win results. The Director of Industrial Relations retired with a huge success under his belt, having introduced a negotiations model and training that became the required standard for all regions of the global mining company.
In another role, Mark worked with a leading global pharmaceutical company, which after a major acquisition faced the familiar challenges of an acquisition integration. The two companies had very different organisational cultures and structures, leaders in each organisation were suspicious of the other organisation, strategic goals were not aligned, and organisation structures were mismatched.
Contracted by the head of Training and organisational Development for the global R&D organisation, Mark lead the team that facilitated new team integrations. The work started by facilitating team building and strategy development for the global R&D leadership team and progressed with similar engagements down through the organisation as the new R&D organisation was formed. Our team also mentored and coached the internal organisational development team through the process. Bain Consulting Group described the integration process as “Best in Class.”
Mark was born and raised in England (traveling extensively throughout Europe as a child) and has lived in the USA since 1985. Mark was an avid student of Karate in college and after graduation studied Japanese at the Oriental Institute of Oxford University. He went on to study Karate while living in Tokyo.
This multicultural background served him well in his role as Director of International Sales and Marketing for a US-based software company where he set up and managed distribution channels throughout Europe and Japan. He built strong working relationships with his partners in all countries and was especially effective at bridging the cultural differences between Japanese and US cultures to create a strong and lasting business partnership.
Mark holds an M.A. in mathematics from Oxford University and an M.Sc. in microelectronics systems design from Brunel University.