Monday Interview: Mike Drabble, managing director of Renewal Counselling and Training

Sheffield-born Mike Drabble has drawn on his professional expertise as a therapist to launch a counselling and training business, explaining how he wants to address the root causes of problems in the workplace.

Drabble is an experienced trainer who has worked in schools and colleges across Yorkshire and Derbyshire. As a qualified counsellor, he has also worked in the NHS, using elements of person-centred counselling and transactional analysis.

Before becoming a counsellor, he was employed in industry and as a college lecturer, in both frontline and strategic roles, giving him an extra appreciation of the issues that can arise from the demands of high pressure work.

He stressed he believes everyone can benefit from counselling and the principles that underpin it.

Renewal, based in Sheffield, was set up three years ago. Drabble said its training courses are designed to empower a team’s ability to deliver by developing confidence, enhancing wellbeing and improving motivation.

“This grew out of my work as a therapist, I wanted to address the causes of problems in the workplace rather than the symptoms,” he said. “You have businesses which aren’t getting the best out of their employees because they’d rather be elsewhere.

“It’s not just absenteeism, it’s ‘presenteeism’ which is a real issue.

“Even though what we offer is not therapy, we use the principles of therapy to address relationships which aren’t working. These are often situations where the people involved know the relationships they have with each other aren’t functioning, but they still repeatedly go about things in the same way. It’s like groundhog day.”

Drabble said his business has two permanent directors and hires staff on a roster basis, as and when needed.

“Corporate training can be very expensive,” he added. “But we’re agile. We don’t have offices and we concentrate on using people with the right expertise, passing on the savings to our clients.

“By working online we can deliver higher quality training at a lower price. We don’t have the fixed costs others have – I don’t think we could have run this type of business even just 10 years ago.

“Over the next 12 to 18 months we want to get the message out to even more people about what we can offer to help them.

“Companies are now more aware of health and wellbeing. And we’re getting a rise in enquiries from managers who have wellbeing problems themselves, because they are not trained to handle staff who have these issues.

“We can provide managers with the training they need to be more resilient when staff come to them with these problems.”

Drabble is also an elected member of Sheffield City Council, as well as a Trustee of Sheffield Theatres, Sheffield Media and Exhibition Centre and Sheffield’s University Technical College.

He said his experiences as a councillor had proved useful for his role in training and counselling.

“Being a councillor has made me more aware of how difficult it is for many companies and individuals to make ends meet,” he said.

“People are under increasing pressure, having to work extra jobs. Businesses have had years of austerity and uncertainty and politics has become very ‘red in tooth and claw'”.

He said his firm’s biggest challenge was to ensure it distinguishes its services from other providers.

“Sometimes training can be quite off the peg, but we’re not one-size-fits-all,” he said. “We don’t think there’s anyone else out there offering the kind of training we’re doing.”