Mark Denton (UK)

ABOUT//
Born and educated in the Midlands of the UK, Mark has always had a passion for people and an eye for performance. This was first nurtured when working on the shop floor of his family’s shoe manufacturing company in the school holidays, introducing several initiatives to make people feel more valued whilst being more productive in what was a very traditional top-down, numbers focussed environment. The seeds of the importance of people focussed leadership was firmly planted!
His early working life was spent running his own car valet business before he sold it to his competitor to attend the University of Bedfordshire as a mature student. Three years later he surfaced with an honours degree in Business Administration with Human Resource Management, which he first put to use as an Account Executive for a media agency in London.

But city life was not his destiny, and two years later he left to concentrate on his other passion – sailing. 4 years and 30,000 sea miles later, Mark entered the grueling selection procedure against 186 others to be a skipper on the BT Global Challenge 2000/2001, the ultimate environment to put everything he had learned about sailing and working with people into practice. Victorious, he went on to skipper ‘BP Explorer’, the yacht sponsored by energy giant BP in this toughest of round the world yacht races achieving a podium position.

More races followed and for the next three years his feet barely touched the floor. However another calling was emerging, as Mark’s multi-media story recounting the leadership and teamwork lessons learned from the BT Global Challenge took off. This also led him to get involved in many leadership and team development initiatives within these clients, and in 2006 Mark established the dynamic organization development consultancy MAXVMG that he still leads to this day.

Mark is also a sought-after Executive and Team coach, and a Master Practitioner and Circle Member of Executive Arts, a company that manages the distribution and use of the innovative Transition Maps that help individuals, teams, and organizations that are grappling with confounding change.

Mark lives with his wife, two children, and two dogs near Southampton in Hampshire. Hobbies include skiing, keeping fit, running, cycling, paddleboarding. And of course sailing!