Outdoor coaching
121 Coaching Herefordshire Sept 2024

Outdoor Leadership Development

At last, outdoor coaching and facilitation for leaders and teams has become part of the ‘normal’ portfolio of tools available for senior leadership development, and the Clearworks Team is fully upskilled and working outdoors whenever possible. It has such profound benefits, especially in the digitally heavy world of 2025.

If you are responsible for developing leadership in your organisation, as a member of the C-Suite or People Team, this blog is especially for you.

Scientists and business schools are supporting its use, with data and facts to back it up.
Why we need data to prove what we know so strongly and intrinsically in our bodies, is, in itself, a curious observation of the disconnect in the modern world.. but effects on creativity, reducing stress & burnout, promoting innovation & problem solving, reconnecting with feelings of contentment, awe and peace and creating more entrepreneurship, are all measurable and clear. This is powerful work.

Increasingly, organisations are realising the benefit of taking their leaders and teams outside, and we now regularly run leadership development journeys that include outdoor work.

At the simplest, a walk and talk in Regents Park or along the river; a chance to reflect in front of a statue at a museum. At its deeper level, a team coaching retreat with an overnight stay, including campfires, mountains; an escape to Campwell Woods near Bath, or a walk along part of the Camino in Spain.

The work we currently deliver outdoors is focused in two key areas for the C-Suite and Senior Leaders in your STEM organisation:

1) One-to-one individual coaching with Leaders & Founders

2) Senior Team development


    One-to-one Individual Coaching

      We often work with leaders and founders as they explore the deeper, existential challenges that arise in positions of senior leadership (or over the age of 45!). Grappling with questions of purpose and legacy; exploring the wisdom, courage, and humility that come with more years on this planet. Experiences of grief, transition, reinvention, come along at exactly the same time that careers peak. At this stage of life, high performance is a non-negotiable and the loneliness of senior leadership is real.

      This type of work is so well matched to working outdoors where we can select the right approach for the Client. Some will simply be energised by a walk in the elements, away from the desk. Noone can interrupt with a knock at the door, and the movement helps the cogs in the brain. Some people though, will enjoy exploring all the metaphors and even spiritual connection with the awe of nature, trees, mountains and springs. I have lost count of the number of clients who’ve stopped dead as the view stole their breath, asked to sit for a while, and then found the breakthrough that eluded them for months before.

      Senior Team Development

      We also work with teams as they form and accelerate..or sometimes as they falter or even start to fall out..

      Examples include:

      • Team Away Days and Team Off-Sites:
        • Being outdoors can work in so many ways to promote creative thinking, entrepreneurship and innovation techniques. Celebrating success, building a new team, running retros and even going deep on one big conversation that needs bottoming out. Imagine what a difference it could make to your team’s trickiest conversation if you took it out on a trail with an expert facilitator..
      • Team Retreats:
        • Accelerate the process of forming, storming, norming. Focus on collective creativity and build aligned, high performing teams, on overnight retreats. This can take place in venues as diverse as coastal Devon, the Atlas Mountains in North Africa and the chalk hills of Oxfordshire!! Whatever your appetite and budget for adventure, anything is possible. Importantly – this doesn’t have to have a giant budget and can be simple and highly impactful outdoors. Think of times you’ve sat around a campfire and experienced the magic that happens there. Skilled facilitation can work with this magic to help your team’s conversations.

      • Leadership Development Journeys:
        • If you are seeking deeper change, the input needs to last longer than an away day. A retreat alone will rarely bring about long-lasting culture or behaviour change. Historically, High Performing Team journeys would have been hosted in a room. In 2020 much of this work moved to Teams or Zoom.. Now in 2025 we’ve learned so much about hybrid delivery that bespoke, powerful development plans can be created across the calendar and the globe to engage global SLTs in deep work that includes the outdoors – walking, sitting, climbing, gathering in ways that match the ethos and style of your C-Suite and Leadership population.

      Who delivers this work at Clearworks:


      Garry Pratt: Facilitation & Team Mentoring:

      Garry works globally outdoors with teams of leaders. He’s an innovator and entrepreneur, with a successful background in the scale and sale of a tech business. He’s now a facilitator and author with a passion for harnessing the natural world to unlock human potential. His work is rooted in Attention Restoration Theory (ART), which suggests that natural environments have a unique capacity to restore our mental focus and creativity. Through his book, The Creativity Factor, Garry introduces a methodology designed to enhance creativity by combining movement, mindfulness, and immersion in nature — all with the goal of replenishing the cognitive resources that modern life often drains.


      Aly King-Smith: Executive Coaching & OD Consulting:

      Aly is Founding Director at Clearworks and has been working across the UK and Europe with leaders in the C-Suite and SLT since 2005. A post-grad qualified Executive Coach, with a successful commercial sales leadership career in the pharmaceutical and vaccine sectors. Aly started her working life (a long time ago!) as a Chartered Physiotherapist at University College Hospital in London. The circle back to incorporating a focus on healthy happy humans is now very strong, and her work to reduce the burnout epidemic is growing all the time.

      Aly has a reputation for working with compassion, intuition and courage in equal measure, with C-Suite leaders who are exploring their work and life in combination, individually and in teams. She is an intuitive, systemic coach with a strong bias for the outdoors as a therapeutic partner in her practice.

      Tracy Skyrme: Coaching, Facilitation & Culture Consulting:

      Ex KPMG, Tracy is a Culture Consultant and Executive Coach with over 20 years’ experience across all sectors. She works with the whole system – physical, mental, emotional & purposeful using physical intelligence & embodiment. Not many people have both Royal Navy and Yoga Teacher on their CV – and that says a great deal about Tracy’s depth and breadth as a human and in outdoor leadership development. She works with Senior Teams and Leaders as a key member of the delivery and design team at Clearworks. If you need a large scale transformation programme, a restorative retreat or a strategic thinking partner outside, Tracy is the Exec Coach you need. We would describe Tracy Skyrme as “best in class” in creating and designing programmes that really make the long term difference to clients.

      This article was written by Aly King-Smith. Aly is Director of Clearworks and writes for Clearworks and others as Aly KS & Co Ltd. Please get in contact via aly@clearworkscoaching.co.uk