About Emma Mills-Sheffield, leadership and an obsession with productivity
As a strategic business consultant I focus on working across multiple sectors with business leaders from owner-managed businesses to global corporates. I help business leaders drive efficiency and productivity and build resilience to get the best from their organisation but also importantly for their employees.
I started Mindsetup having spent 15 years in industry leading major sales pursuits, efficiency projects, process improvements, training delivery, workshop facilitation and coaching. Having worked for KPMG, WSP and in the creative and digital industries, I have experience from central government and local authorities, FTSE100 and Fortune500 companies to charities, SMEs and start-ups.
Core services which focus on efficiency, productivity and resilience include:
- Business strategy & planning
- Leadership & executive coaching
- Team development & training
- Process & systems improvements
- Organisational development
- Operational efficiency
My approach is based on identifying how businesses can run more efficiently and through coaching and training how employees can develop and thrive in the workplace.
It’s a passion of mine to empower people and to look beyond pure profit and cost reduction as a successful business is more than just the bottom line.
Emma Mills-Sheffield
My leadership journey
My leadership coaching encourages using empathy, humility and vulnerability at the core of developing a high performing team. I lean on my experience of resilience and ‘bouncing forward’ to bring empathy to my work and how I develop my clients.
Having led many teams in the past and navigated the challenges of large and small organisations, I’ve observed repeated leadership behaviours – both good and bad. When you experience great leadership, organisations thrive. But bad leadership, often being driven from insecurity and instability, causes a toxicity which damages both employees and entire organisations.
More importantly, and what sets me apart, is my experience in resilience, growth, empathy and knowing that life is short. This means I offer a very different approach to coaching and business consultancy with empathetic listening, integrity and building trust.
Having been closely bereaved in my early 20s my focus on resilience and more recently understanding this to be post-traumatic growth, has shaped the way I work and the leader I have become.
My often quoted mantra is “life is short” as I believe in having fun at work as well as working hard and supporting the communities around us.
Awards & associations
In January 2020 I was named as one of 100 female entrepreneurs in the UK as part of the small business campaign f:Entrepreneur. The campaign including #ialso Top 100 is a collection of women who inspire their peers and communities through their businesses and wider activities.
I’m also a Fellow of the RSA – an organisation with a global community of 30,000 proactive problem solvers who share the RSA’s vision and values.
Voluntary & charity work
My charity involvement includes being the Chair of the Board for Brighton based charity Grassroots Suicide Prevention and I enjoy putting on afternoon teas for Contact the Elderly (Re-Engage). I’m an active member of the Brighton business community and I sit on the Board of the Brighton Chamber.
Mentoring
I also mentor small businesses and scale ups through various national business support programmes including the Help to Grow Management programme, Coast2Capital and business students at the University of Sussex. Over 2021-22 as part of the team at always possible, I mentored over 60 businesses in East Sussex to secure business growth grants and worked with several minority-owned businesses and charities on their growth journey.
As featured in
Business Consultancy
Helping you get clear on your strategy, make a plan and scale up from strong foundations. Enabling you to go through change and grow more successfully
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Team Development
High performing teams are the foundation of successful organisations; using empathy, humility and vulnerability to create trust and focus
Events & Workshops
Facilitated workshops, events, training days, panel discussions and seminars. Face-to-face and online to enable business growth