The British Library
Transformational Change Leadership (2007-09)
Client Background
The British Library is a non-departmental public body (NDPB) sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and is one of the world’s leading national libraries. The Library occupies five sites, four in London and one in Boston Spa in Yorkshire and employs 2,000 staff.
The library serves business and industry, researchers, academics and students, in the UK and world-wide. Each year 6 million searches are generated by the British Library online catalogue, nearly 400,000 visit their Reading Rooms and over 100 million items are supplied to users all over the world.
The Library receives a copy of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland and the collection includes well over 150 million items, in most known languages. 3 million new items are added every year including manuscripts, maps, newspapers, magazines, prints and drawings, music scores, and patents, all of which requires over 625 km of shelves, and grows by 12 km every year.
Led in part by the Government’s agenda for public sector modernisation and reform alongside a challenging business plan, there is a strong realisation that leadership is critical to their future success and there has been a significant investment in leadership development for both senior and middle managers over the last 4 years.
The Clients Brief
The Director of Operations and Services (O&S) identified a need in his senior leadership team (SLT) of 10 for development in transformational change leadership skills.The O&S has directorate has implemented significant change over the last 5 years, characterised by process improvement, the introduction of new technology and working practices and restructuring.
, TCP were initially asked to design and deliver a practical, flexible and innovative intervention to equip the O&S leadership team with an understanding of the principles of Transformational Change Leadership which they could apply in adapting their day to day leadership roles and style, and to the modernisation of the directorate. The emphasis in this programme was to be on self awareness, personal change skills and practical solutions and tools to build high levels of commitment through engagement with all stakeholders.
In terms of style the requirement was for a facilitated, experiential learning approach rather than traditional training style, with delegates working on their live change projects and issues and learning from each other. Also, to carry out “Live” change diagnostics and apply tools to create remedial action plans while practicing key skills such as communicating change and handling entrenched resistance. The workshop also had to be tailored to fit different skills, experience levels and learning styles with a view to rolling the intervention out to the next layer of the organisation if the pilot was successful
Our Contribution
Initially a pilot 2 day residential workshop was designed and run around meeting the following objectives, with each delegate being asked to complete a reflective change diagnostic pre-work questionnaire for a specific change they were heavily involved in which could be use as a learning vehicle during the session.
· Share past experiences and surface the leadership learning’s from past TBL change initiatives to understand the current change culture and identify organisational strengths and weaknesses.
· Develop a deeper understanding of the critical success factors underpinning successful transformational change and the critical role of visible leadership in releasing benefits
· Understand the emotional and psychological impact of change and where they and their colleagues are in relation to the process of transition and their support and development needs.
· Developing the self awareness, attitudes, knowledge and interpersonal skills to lead change, engage others, build commitment and maintain their performance during transition.
· Develop structured involvement strategies and plans to anticipate risks, surface barriers, bring people with them and enrich change solutions.
· Design integrated change leadership communities of Sponsors and Change Agents at all levels, transcending functional and organizational boundaries that ensure the right power and influence is focused on delivering change.
· Develop the advanced communication and dialogue skills to handle critical change conversations that help overcome entrenched resistance
Intervention Impact
The pilot programme was very well received by all the delegates and with very few refinements, was repeated with 2 further groups of 12 delegates who reported to the pilot managers within the O&S Directorate. This helped to embed a common language, mind set and tool kit to the management of the portfolio of change projects running in the directorate with a critical mass of around 40 key managers. These ranged from senior change sponsors, middle management operational change agents, project managers, IT and HR specialist solution builders.
The key sponsor of this initiative, the Director of O&S, temporarily transferred to a new role as Director of Scholarships and collections and a tailored version of the same workshop was run for his 8 direct reports who were facing similar challenges around the leadership and engagement of staff involved in a major programme of change.
Following this programme a major dedicated project team working on a significant Newspaper storage and access restructuring project took part in a further tailored version of the workshop. On this occasion the focus was the collective team project rather than the individual delegate’s projects. The project was at a crucial milestone, 2 years into the project and the workshop helped the group surface learnings, fine tune their structure and roles and identify clearer priorities and more effective change management techniques to steer the next phase by applying there learning from the previous phases.
Following these 3 strands of activity the TCP Change Leadership workshop has been adopted as best practice management development for operations managers and project teams within the BL
This fairly intensive development support has been strongly welcomed by the client and the individual participants, resulting in extremely impactful learning experiences, and immediate behavioural changes back-at-work. Post workshop feedback was consistent from all the sessions and particularly positive around the –
· balance of theory, application, discussion and experiential learning
· relevance and uniqueness of the models explored
· ease of application of simple tools and the flexible,
· interactive, flexible and engaging facilitation style
· practicality of the insights and action plans created around live changes during the session.
