Joel Toms

At a glance:

Joined Baringa in
2017

Works across
Financial Services, Government and Retail energy

What job would you be doing in another life
Before I abandoned engineering and went into consulting, I worked as a ski instructor. In another life I might have made the choice to continue that 

In detail:

Joel works in the Operations and Organisational Transformation team, leading Operational Excellence (OE) programmes, looking at both process and team ways of working lenses. He works with clients to shift their approach from single improvement initiatives, to creating an organisational culture of continuous improvement – establishing not only the method but the supporting capability, structures and leadership mindset to enable sustainable performance improvement. 

The primary goal of Joel’s work is to deliver tangible benefit, but leave behind capability for clients to continue the rollout themselves. This means that he spends time training and coaching team leaders and leadership teams, as well as rolling up his sleeves and getting involved in data analysis and problem solving in with the teams. His approach is to partner as closely as possible and not be seen as a consultant but one of the clients own team. 

Joel loves to learn new approaches and is always challenging where we can do things differently and incorporate the latest thinking. He is a passionate on reading around the subject and is happy to give book recommendations! This led him to broaden his expertise and spend time working in agile, as a scrum master initially and later an agile coach. He has adopted a lot of these agile practices into operational work to help deliver faster more effective improvements. 

Joel’s past projects included a large scale productivity programme at a Central Government Organisation, where he helped to build their Centre of Excellence for the programme, worked with multiple team leaders but also delivered the leadership programme which ran in parallel with the team based training. More recently he has undertaken a similar role in the private sector with a Financial Institution, revitalising their OE programme and launching team ways of working across their mortgage process, helping uplift the throughput and reinvest capacity into the constrained parts of the process – all delivered hand in hand with the team leaders and their teams. 

Away from work, Joel loves exploring the outdoors and hiking, especially if it involves an overnight stay in a mountain hut. One of his favourite places is the Lake District, where he has spent time almost every year since he was born and holds a special attachment.