The Taylor Clarke Partnership. Realeasing Potential In Organisations

Client Requirements

Aberlour are a complex, well funded and rapidly growing multi site voluntary organisation involved in Child Care Services in Scotland, employing 800 staff to deliver 46 discrete services in partnership with 14 different local authorities.

Following a reappraisal of Aberlour growth strategy in an increasingly regulated, competitive and changing environment, a development partnership was formed with TCP to help unlock the change leadership potential, capability and capacity to deliver on an unprecedented transformational change agenda. The key change drivers were growth requirements, improved partnership working, new service development, evidence based practice and embedding the leadership and management values, skills and behaviours to change the organisational culture.

Aberlour were seeking to build a critical mass of leaders at all levels who:

• embraced common organisational principles and values.
• Valued their leadership role as important as their practitioner role
• were more confident, self aware, engaging, challenging and supportive in their leadership style
• could create the environment where the workforce is more enabled to contribute more to addressing the new challenges facing the organisation.
• Were resilient, more collaborative and focused on continuous professional development.
• Work together to make the transition from a “loosely connected federation of small organisations” to a more “Integrated corporate body” with a common sense of purpose and values” and a more “business like approach”.

Our Contribution

Over the last 18 months TCP have worked closely with the Aberlour senior management to design and deliver a serious of development workshops for the top 50 Aberlour managers covering a broad range of Leadership, Change Management and Team Effectiveness topics to help managers -

• Learn from past change implementation activities.
• Challenge themselves to become more self aware, motivated and equipped to change their behaviour, improve levels of trust in leadership and gain a more genuine sense of collective responsibility, critical to the whole process.
• Develop a shared language and “mind set” around change project implementation principles, challenges and approaches to help promote benefit release, learning and best practice.
• Adopt best practice working across all areas of change leadership in the context of major change with the support of a comprehensive tool kit of processes, activity templates, diagnostic tools and key skills.
• Feel more competent and confident in their ownership of effecting organisational change and development
• Understand the difference between leadership and management and the need for balance between delivering results and supporting staff development.
• Understand themselves and others better in the context of their existing leadership values, strengths and weaknesses and future leadership motivations, potential, approach and development needs
• Improve their ability and confidence to lead in a flexible and conscious way, adjusting their style in response to the needs of different teams, individuals and situations
• Identify, apply and value the core skills, techniques and behaviours required to apply a coaching/empowering style of leadership to help develop, motivate and release the potential in their staff.
• Feel more able to cope and help others deal with the feelings associated with the disruption and uncertainty that accompanies major change.
• Effect better team working and teambuilding to establish the new team culture and working practices

The Impact

All workshops have received very high participant ratings which point to our facilitation expertise and content knowledge. 

Overall, higher levels of commitment, collaboration and discretionary effort are emerging and improving contribution and personal accountability, through leadership of more empowered teams in full support of the new change agenda.

The insights into opportunities to lead and manage change with more sensitivity have been widely recognised as contributing significantly to the new structure, processes and systems improving service levels to existing internal and external customers.

Following on from the major impact of the initial work on staff behaviours, attitude and engagement, the programme was extended to work in more depth with the senior teams following a major re-organisation, to ensure the new skills, learning and attitudes are embedded in the organisational culture in a continuing partnership.

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