A Community Housing Directorate at a Local Authority was under pressure to improve efficiency in line with the Government’s Modernisation Agenda. This meant reviewing processes that had been in existence for years, streamlining structures and removing duplication of effort. In addition there was a major relocation of staff to new premises. This created a substantial amount of change for the organisation and also presented significant management challenges to be addressed in responding to the new opportunities and the implications of this for management development over the next 2-3 years.

We had been running some managing change courses at the Authority which led on to an invitation to facilitate the Housing management meetings and run some team building events. The Housing Director asked us to work with her to help prepare the housing function for restructuring.

Her brief was to propose ‘something a bit different to help the team get ready for the next few years and to mesh them more as a management team.’ It needed participants to raise their game and that of the organisation. The approach was based upon the assumption that each leader’s style and leadership development opportunities are different so the more the experience is personalised, the more powerful the learning experience. We designed a number of events with the aim of offering senior managers the opportunity of sharing their challenges and needs with one another and to facilitate a process whereby they generated their own ideas for development. The benefit of this approach was that there would be more ownership for the subsequent change programme, we could take in to account the changing environment in which they operated and there would be the opportunity of working together and supporting each other on live issues. So the learning arose from the work itself. This self managed learning approach was a core learning platform and let them practice leadership, sharpen their team skills as they address complex and challenging issues, develop self awareness, and link their learning back to the work environment.

It was highly successful and managers who had not been taking responsibility for the changes that needed to happen in the Directorate, began to do so.