Leadership Development - Resilience - Change Management

The Client

The Deputy Vice Chancellor of a University employing some 5000 staff operaitng across multiple campuses within and outside Australia.

The Brief

To design and faciltiate a focused workshop for 50 senior staff in leadership positions both subject to and required to lead major business areas through a period of far reaching organisational change.

The workshop was conducted at a time of significant uncertainty where changes yet to be announced would impact on staff numbers at all levels, merging of some areas, new business processes, and in all cases introducing new structures to all areas.

Our client wanted to provide focused professional leadership development to senior leaders both to support them directly in working through significant change and to enable them to better lead and support their staff through uncertain and difficult times.

Our Response

We designed a workshop with a dual focus - assist participants to identify personal strategies for managing change and strategies for leading others through change.  The approach recognised the personal impact and uncertaintly being faced by many of the senior leaders, including concerns about job security both for themselves and staff.

Using an interactive and experiential approach we guided participants through a process to explore the dynamics of large scale change, appreciate the psychological and behavioural responses, recognise stages of personal transition, the range of reactions and feelings during change and at different stages of change, recognise mindful choices and options in response to change, and appreciate concepts of resilience and how to build and support this personally and in others. 

Finally the workshop assisted participants to identify the practical needs of their teams and practical leadership actions they could adopt to support their teams and individuals within their teams. 

The Results

We received positive feedback about the workshop.

Senior leaders, who had felt somewhat isolated in working through uncertainty, were able to share the impacts of their situation with others, while also gaining an appreciation of the varied other impacts and reactions that their peers were experiencing.  They were able to share strategies regarding how they were managing the changes personally and with their teams. 

We were subsequently engaged to design and facilitate a workshop with the management team of one of the larger, highly impacted functions.  This assisted this leadership group to work through a specifically tailored process to consider the changes they were facing, enabling a 'deeper dive' and development of a plan to manage their particular circumstances as a leadership team.