Yaakov Atik

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Yaakov Atik has worked as a facilitator and consultant for over 30 years in the area of people management.

His focus has been in the areas of teambuilding, coaching, action learning and consultancy, intentionally focusing on those themes that revolve around relationships between people.

His early career was mostly in the area of team building. As a civilian in the Teambuilding unit of the Israeli Defense forces, he facilitated team building workshops with a variety of officer teams. He then worked as a consultant for the Israeli Telephone Company before coming to England in 1990.

Yaakov has worked independently since 1992 in the public sector, mostly in the NHS. A second opportunity to use his experience with teams came when he worked as a full-time facilitator for two years for the Royal College of Nursing taking part in a pilot project on the theme of improving the effectiveness of Clinical Nursing teams.

While in England he discovered Action Learning (Co-operative Learning Circles), which he believes is a powerful tool for personal development.

He has led, designed and facilitated dozens of AL programmes for the South West NHS Executive. The two target populations for this activity were senior nursing managers and deputy directors of finance in the Southwest region. He is currently engaged in facilitating a series of Full Circle programmes for Oasis.

Yaakov has a great interest in conflict resolution, which was a major theme in the work described above. In that context, he is currently a volunteer mediator for the Leeds Mediation Centre. He is also involved in two dialogue programmes in the Leeds Jewish community, finding that dialogue techniques can be very productive in resolving conflict.

He holds an MSc in Organisational Psychology with a thesis on the relationship between conductors and orchestras.