In the last few years, counselling has become something of a growth industry. It seems that no major life event, whether joyous or traumatic, can take place without being accompanied by an offer of counselling. This growth has extended to the workplace. Here effective managers have adopted the very best of counselling skills and adapted them to improve face-to-face communications with their staff. The result is not strictly counselling in the professional sense but a way of managing people that we can call “the counselling approach”.