Case studies

Our approach is highly personal, deeply experiential and fuelled by feedback. There is no one-size fits all. So although our expertise may fit into brand categories of activity, the services we provide are tailored to the people we work with and the goals they’re working toward.

We think the results speak for themselves. Discover the impact we’ve made for organisations like yours.

The NHS Leadership Academy exists to develop and grow high quality professional leadership across the NHS in England.  This is aimed at creating a positive culture that enables collaborative leadership to deal effectively with the enormous demands on the NHS. The Academy aims to create a culture of compassion and care across the NHS, where Directors face into and deal with challenges, the like of which has not been known before. We have supported and facilitated two core programmes, both of which are experienced by participants as profound and transformational.

The introduction of new engineering programmes required a shift in leadership style and more working cross functionally because of the level of complexity and the need to solve problems quickly. The leadership development work we did with the whole leadership population including the executives gave people skills and a language to get to the heart of the issue with each other and resolve problems at pace. The combination of these elements led to wider awareness of the organisation and to sustained behaviour changes when working cross-functionally. This propelled a period of significant change from legacy ways of working to new products and governance.

We designed and facilitated a leadership development process aimed at growing a leadership cadre globally and readying participants for executive level appointments. The programme brought together elements of authentic leadership and effective leadership behaviours with a focus on the strategic context of BBCWorldwide at the time. One of the particular strategic challenges for BBC Worldwide was its position as the commercial arm of a licence fee funded, public service broadcaster. Some cultural and purpose tensions existed that required sensitive negotiation. Very soon after the programme had taken place the CEO was already noticing changes in the collective leadership of the Global Leadership Team.

We work with the global procurement and European compliance teams to develop strategic influencing skills in the UK, US and Far East. Our work has developed relationships internally that enable the teams to work more effectively with each other as well as providing skills, insights and behavioural development to improve influencing for results with key external stakeholders.

We developed facilitation skills for internal senior leaders and HR professionals, enabling them to improve the quality of their meetings and group events to increase engagement and ensure that any issues are identified as early as possible. They report being a lot more confident in how they operate with groups, able to steer the conversation in a purposeful direction and understand the impact on dynamics of the small things they do. Observers say they are much better at exploring the range of views in the room, surfacing assumptions and surfacing things that might be a problem further down the line.

We supported the executive leadership team in implementing a brand new executive agency of the Scottish Government. This includes effective collaborative and team working within the team, with the overall programme and with Scottish Government ministers and civil servants.

We’ve worked with the executive board to enable them to have deeper and more challenging conversations with each other. This has involved 121 coaching and facilitating away days with the team to identify less helpful patterns and to develop the trust and skills required to stay in healthy tension for longer. There is now an increase in challenge both within the team, and by them role modelling changes in approach, within the wider leadership teams and organisation.

With a focus on improving quality to customer, we designed and facilitated leadership conferences to shift them from being information transmission in the hope that people will do something different as a result, to the whole leadership group working collectively on the real challenges of the business. Alongside changes to their performance framework, these highlighted the need for quality and the barriers to the organisation achieving their targets. These included cross functional sharing of objectives, bringing the customer/service user into the room, and structured conversations between front line employees and the executive board to explore systemic issues that the executive team were blind to. The impact was improved quality measurements within the performance management framework and greater trust between senior management and the organisation.

Developing a shared language across the organisation and working with the larger leadership group on their collective leadership of the business. The combination of our style of leadership development plus working more directly on the culture has unlocked something in this business. They have found a way to talk about many things that had previously been undiscussable and, as a result, problems that had been lurking for some time are getting resolved rather than “papered over”. In turn this is enabling them to deliver on their ambitious goals for the organisation.