Biography
Walt Hopkins works with people as a consultant, as a coach, and as a course facilitator.
As a consultant, Walt works with clients to design learning experiences that match customer needs with tested models and approaches. These learning experiences range from intensive skill-building sessions to extended personal-and-professional-development sequences.
As a coach of individuals, Walt encourages people to focus on core values, to focus on doing more of what is working well, and to design a balanced life and career.
As a coach of teams, Walt encourages teams (and the individuals on the teams) to understand and value differences, to focus on doing more of what is working well, and to balance process roles so that tasks get done effectively and efficiently.
As a course facilitator, Walt works with people to assess current skills, to explore new skills, to plan how to use the skills, to practise using the skills, and to apply the skills in actual situations.
A client describes Walt’s work this way: “Walt is world-class in what he does and he has dedicated himself to designing unique approaches for working with people. Walt’s work goes to the heart of his subject; it is not about techniques but about the values and behaviour change that are fundamental to real growth.”
Over the past thirty years, Walt has worked with people from more than fifty countries. He has worked with many organizations, including Apple, the BBC, Chevron, Digital, Disney, GKN Driveline, Heidelberg, OMV, Procter & Gamble, Shell, Statoil, Unilever, and the United Nations World Food Programme.
Walt is based in Scotland, where he has worked with Fife Council, Motorola, the Scottish Development Agency, the Scottish Prison Service, Solectron, Standard Life, Sun Micro, and schools in Fife and Renfrew through ISIS: Imagine Schools In Scotland.
In 1986, Organization Design & Development published Walt’s unique poster-based approach to career and life design entitled A Goal Is A Dream Taken Seriously and this is the basis for his Create Your Future workshop.
Since 1990, Walt has been refining a communications model that he uses to work with people on Influencing for Results and Leading for Results. The questionnaire at the heart of this model is now available online in ten languages.
With his colleague George Simons, Walt designed the Culture Visa and created the workbook for Not My Type: Valuing Diversity, the award-winning video from Video Arts.
Walt has been a professional member of the NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science since 1983. For the 8th edition of the Reading Book for Human Relations Training, published by NTL Institute, Walt contributed chapters on diversity, journaling, and Appreciative Inquiry. For the NTL series Keys to Group Effectiveness, Walt has contributed the booklets on Journaling and on Influencing. For NTL, Walt leads the annual Appreciative Inquiry Human Interaction Lab and the Create Your Future workshop.
Walt has been a faculty member of Management Centre Europe since 1982. For MCE, Walt leads courses on Influencing Across Your Organisation, Building Partnerships, and Interpersonal Effectiveness for Senior Executives.
Walt has a B.A. from the College of Wooster, an M.Litt. from the University of Edinburgh, a Ph.D. from Union Graduate School, and two diplomas from the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland.
Walt was born in the USA and has lived in Europe since 1982. He studied in Scotland for two years in the sixties and returned to Scotland in 1997 after living in London for 15 years. He has taught in high schools, alternative colleges, and a race-and-sex-desegregation project. In 1983, he founded Castle Consultants International, which is now part of a worldwide network of interdependent consultants. His mission is to encourage people to do more of what they do best; when Walt is doing what he does best, people around him begin changing their lives.