Angela Peacock is the Managing Director of the highly successful management training organisation The People Development Team. The organisation’s vision is clear: to enable individuals, teams and organisations to be the best they can. Their methods: encouraging, cajoling and facilitating them to aim high and then even higher. This approach to the art of good management is reflected clearly in Angela’s background and past life – from child actor to the City, from flower arranging and cake decoration to internationally acclaimed businesswoman, her inspirational brand of reality management and her ability to inspire and entertain, go down a storm whether you are looking to shake up a workforce or entertain after a serious business dinner. She has the ability to make us laugh, reflect and even radically change behaviours in just a twenty minute presentation.

It was at stage school that Angie developed not only her own confidence, but the ability to gain the confidence of others. She also gained a reputation for being able to fill in the gaps left by other actors who had dried, by delivering convincing, passionate “Shakespearian speeches” that Shakespeare himself had never actually penned.

The 1980s saw Angie running the department of one of the up and coming software houses in the City. Her outlook then, as it is now, was that attitude, approach and flexibility in a changing world can go a long way to make up for what age and knowledge lack. Building a high performing team of thirty plus year olds at just twenty-one was made easier by her energy, enthusiasm and her ability to be a chameleon. As Angie says “Leadership is about understanding yourself first, others second and then reconciling how you can bring the two together.  It is about strength of character but also about adaptation”.

Adaptation is something that Angie is all too familiar with, having made the move from City life into the world of small business, although in an unexpected field. Angie worked with her mother – a brilliant flower arranger - to develop a thriving business which unleashed the creative talents of florists and gave Angie plenty of experience on setting up and running her own business. Expansion into the field of cake decorating saw Angie discovering to her amazement that this art was indeed another forte! In a career and life changing moment, Angie designed a twenty-fifth wedding cake with a complete replica of the church, in which the couple were married, on the top. It was clearly time to move into a new area lest the next project be icing the Taj Mahal.

It was at this point in the mid 1990s that Angie saw a huge need for the delivery of good, high profile training for women in areas such as Coaching, Assertiveness and Confidence Building .  After running some of these programmes on a local basis she met with her now business partner Heather Butler who sparked the idea that her talents for developing individuals would be best used in a business environment.

With a degree of blind innocence, Angie got her first job running a three day team building programme for an organisation in North Wales . “The more I worked with the organisation the more I saw that my open and completely objective view of what was going on there was actually correct. The suggestions I made were based on the common sense that we all have and hey-presto they seemed to work.”

1998 brought Angie’s first appearance on TV with the Engineering Matters and Open University programmes. In this same year Angie and Heather launched The People Development Team, an international training company that now lists among its clients the Bank of England, Diageo, Guinness, Cendris (TPG) and H M Customs and Excise to name but a few. Since then Angie’s expertise as a speaker has been sought throughout the world. Her common sense approach combined with “telling it like it is” humour and personal anecdotes bring the results organisations need from speakers.

Angie seizes on life’s opportunities no matter how daunting. This was well illustrated when, as a delegate on a DTI programme, she was asked to step into the shoes of an Arabic Princess who had failed to arrive. Asked with just a few minutes notice if she could speak on the impact of developing people on an organisation’s bottom line, Angie took the stage without hesitation. A question and answer panel that included Baroness Perry and Sir David Gore-Booth, demonstrated clearly how much she had excited the international audience when all the questions were aimed at her!  Following this she was asked by the DTI and the Arab Women in Business programme to speak at a series of lunches, dinners and seminars in the Arab World during 2001/2002.  These were a resounding success and she is often asked to return.

2002 brought success in the US as a keynote speaker at a series of organisational team building events and at a seminar organised by Willis Caroon for the Relocation and Risk Industry. In 2003, it was Europe and an international banking conference in Switzerland on the subject of bringing down barriers and working in teams to improve the delegates’ personal and business life.

Angie’s presentations on Change awaken us to the realisation that change is all around but also deal with the psychology; the thoughts that go on inside our heads internally that need to be dealt with before they become behaviours that could act against change.  Lately she has been called on to deliver speeches that look at how we make ourselves and the people around us fit for constant and positive change.

In the UK Angie’s media career continues to blossom, often being asked to commentate on both generalist and business topics on radio and TV.  Keynote speeches at organisational conferences are designed and made specific for the client and given the opportunity Angie will make sure that all delegates are actively involved.

Angie’s ethos is to help people “unleash the dragons within”.  She works on the basis that every individual has a huge talent to offer but often life and our own limited self beliefs keep that talent hidden.  In every business area and with her speaking, Angie strives to give people the tools necessary to unleash their own internal dragons and to see them grow and flourish.