Our Values - Wilderness Expertise Our values

We believe in experiential learning, and the power of a well-designed and well-delivered experience on a young person’s future.

Our strength lies in our person centred approach to everything we do. There are many people who can complete a task, but we look for passion. We select our staff by focusing on what motivates them and what they are passionate about, as well as ability.

This principle ensures that every activity undertaken is conducted to the best of our skills with an aspiration for excellence. “When passion and talent combine – expect a masterpiece…”

We believe all our clients are unique

Therefore, we develop a symbiotic relationship with our clients to evolve our individualised service. We aim to develop long-term relationships that enable us to understand our clients’ needs, systems and approach. This ensures our services are tailored to support our clients’ goals. We pride ourselves on a personal approach that ensures we get honest feedback for the service we provide giving us an opportunity to develop the product further. Feedback drives our business development.

We are committed to ensuring everyone we work with is protected from all forms of harm, be it physical, environmental or psychological.

Safety is a cornerstone of our work. We believe in developing everyone’s awareness of risk and evolving their common sense. Everyone has access to risk assessments and is informed as to the risks, control measures in place and their role as part of that.

We believe in supporting the chosen lifestyle of our staff and in developing their potential.

What makes us unique is the quality of our staff team. We value their input and respect their choices. The support and management team works to ensure the client-facing staff have all they need to meet our clients’ expectations. This is undertaken through a number of initiatives including:

Continuous Professional Development meetings annually
Training budgets
Training discounts for freelance staff
Flexible working conditions
Generous salary packages
Commitment to support a good work-life balance

Our commitment to lifelong learning means we give responsibility and ownership to our team to enable them to express themselves freely, and we grow roles as our capabilities grow. To invest in people for the future we run apprenticeships, work placements and support charitable ventures.

We believe creativity and innovation is key to developing tailored services and motivating staff

Innovation and creativity ensure we meet our clients’ needs and keep our team motivated. We encourage creativity in all our staff, and avoid prescriptive courses, overly rigid timetables and inflexible itineraries. This dynamic approach enables us to achieve a high quality, bespoke service and retain excellent, creative talent who would otherwise move on to express their own talent elsewhere. We ensure our staff are trained and competent to work in a flexible workplace and see change as positive.

We offer a sustainable service to our clients and a sustainable lifestyle to our team

Sustainability requires a holistic view of our operations and its impact on the world, for staff and clients. Our clients require a service that is reliable, affordable and sustainable. This requires consideration of the environment and community interactions, alongside open accounting, feedback and performance reviews.

Our team needs to work with a stable, viable company. The security this brings is reliant on sound open, empathic management, transparent and participatory development programmes and open financial records.

The points from this section are implemented though our:

Environmental Policy
Standard Operating Procedures
R & D Annual Meetings

Quality

We are committed to delivering high quality experiences

As we move services from concept to reality, we rely upon timely feedback to assure quality, and we believe that the client is best placed to advise us and provide direction. We develop strong long-term partnerships based on trust, openness and honesty. We believe in experiential education and review as a key to our own learning and development.

Through practical feedback and strong open relationships, we continue to develop and evolve our services and ensure we stay at the leading edge of our sector.

Developing Potential

The Theory Behind it – Transformational Leadership

Our programmes are grounded in the the principles of Transformational Leadership

“Transformational leaders motivate followers to achieve performance beyond expectations by transforming followers’ attitudes, beliefs, and values, as opposed to simply gaining compliance”
(Bass, 1985; Yukl, 1999)

Transformational Leadership can be defined by the following seven behaviours (Hardy et al., 2010):

Giving praise and recognition when it is due; being constructive with feedback; guiding followers to improve their performance.
Recognising the uniqueness of each individual follower; treating them according to individual needs.
Encouraging each follower to think for him/herself; challenging followers to solve problems by themselves.
Inspiring and encouraging followers so they can, and want to, achieve their best.
Encouraging each follower to want to work as part of a team, and towards shared team goals; putting team needs before ‘self’.
Setting and exemplifying high standards; expecting the individual to always give maximum effort.
Behaving in a consistently appropriate way that fosters the same behaviour amongst the followers; being beyond reproach.

Transformational leadership has long been demonstrated to have a positive
impact in a wide range of sectors; the military (Hardy et al., 2010),
sport (Callow et al., 2009), business (Barling et al., 1996), public sector (Rafferty
& Griffin, 2004), education (Koh et al., 1995) and especially as a result of field based interventions. (McElligott et al, 2015 and Vella, Oades, & Crowe, 2013).