Tasman District Council GII LDP

“We have been very happy to have Kyran and his team in our organisation.  Developing leaders and leadership competencies has been a priority for us for some time now, and we’ve benefited greatly from having ODI on the journey with us.  We had the flexibility to set our learning areas and Kyran’s team of capable presenters then developed the programme content to fit.  We’ve seen a real improvement in competency across our range of participants, and particularly at our team leader level.”  (Joanna Cranness, Human Resources Manager)

Background

Tasman District Council's Generation II Leadership Development Programme provided targeted leadership behavioural learning and application support for 60 Team Leaders and Supervisers (Tiers 3 and 4). Each participant had previously participated in either the Management Group Leadership Development Programme (Tier 3's) or the Co-ordinators and Seniors Leadership Development Programme (Tier 4's). 

The Programme

The programme addressed leadership competency and behavioural improvement opportunities that were identified in a second round of 360 degree reviews for each participant. New leadership development plans were developed by participants in workshops with Kathryn Jackson, using ODI's SOAR Leadership Development Plan tool.

The content workshops were facilitated by Alison Hood and addressed the Tasman leadership competencies of Managerial Courage, Conflict Management, Interpersonal Savvy, Motivating Others, and Building Effective Team.  Alison offered two workshops in the programme, approximately one month apart in cohorts of 15. She introduced Emotional Intelligence (EI) as the major concept for participants to use to manage their own behaviours and to work with their teams.

Each workshop was followed by an opportunity to complete a workplace task set by Alison and supported by ODI's Action Learning Tool with which participants co-worked with workplace colleagues to support one another's application efforts. 

Participants provided evaluative information via exit surveys at the end of each workshop as to their reaction, learning and preparedness for applying learning at work.  They had a reflection opportunity one month after each workshop in which to report practice changes that had made and the impact that had on organisation results.  A summary of those results (and ODI benchmark measures) is as below:

All programmme scores have significantly exceeded benchmark.

Participants provided examples of application of learning and contributions to targeted business outcomes, some of which are reproduced below:

• seeking feedback more often from staff, disbursing information more regularly, working on my delegation skills
• being more mindful of my actions
• working harder at delegation, seeking extra feedback
• paying more attention to one particular relationship
• checking in with my team leaders and the wider team, seeing how they are feeling, discussing where staff are at
• spending more time communicating with staff
• I have been leveraging off my strengths to build team morale
• being on the same page as my team leaders with respect to EI
• better communication and leadership has led to efficiencies when problem solving and responding to issues
• I am far more conscious about sharing knowledge and building my team leaders’ knowledge and resilience to cope with change
• I believe that the work I have done by having pre-meetings has made our work more streamlined, with less uncertainty and conflict.