Convening Strategy Development Sessions
What’s the problem?
Are you a leader who wants to improve or transform the organisation or service(s) you lead?
You may be trying to:
- Create a shared view of the desired future for a service, or a vision for an organisation;
- Generate commitment to a future operating model or way of working together;
- Develop a strategic plan to achieve your objectives.
You need individuals from different professional backgrounds, teams, or even organisations, to come together to develop commitment for the way ahead?
But…
- There’s no time
- There are no established ways of working together (yet).
How Staff College can help
We ensure the process of strategy development doesn’t adversely affect the content of your strategy. What do we mean by that?
How many times have you seen a room of bright people come together to think about and produce a strategy, only for the session to become unproductive due to:
- A poorly structured and over ambitious agenda
- The wrong people in the room and/or the right people missing
- One or two voices dominating proceedings
- Circular arguments
- Temporal fixation – stuck in the past/constrained by the present/dreaming of the future
- Unexplored assumptions and assumed agreements – as these are allowed to go unquestioned the session becomes one of ‘building sandcastles in the air’
These are all process issues.
Staff College works with leaders to prevent these, and other, process issues derailing your strategy or vision development sessions.
Want to understand more about process? Our handy guide explains more here.
Our approach
Staff College work with leaders to convene sessions that:
- enable groups to think, develop and share ideas.
- start to develop commitment to a shared way forwards.
- prevent the de-railing of sessions due to process issues.
We achieve this by:
- closely working with the leader of the group/chair of the session before, during and after the session.
- ensuring that an effective agenda is put together and the right people are in attendance.
- ‘calling out’ unhelpful behaviours during sessions.
- ensuring critical moments are made explicit to all the group – especially around decision making.
Form of support
Staff College work with leaders in response to what they’re trying to achieve, and their needs.
Support could take the form of a blend of the following:
- Supporting leaders to develop their thinking about what they want to achieve by bringing people together;
- Helping leaders, through pre-session engagement, to craft an approach that will develop the conditions for them to achieve the maximum benefit from the sessions;
- Facilitating sessions and providing the space for different views, uncomfortable conversations and generative dialogue;
- Providing process interventions when session agendas are starting to be rail-roaded, to bring them back on track;
- Providing observations and feedback when the dynamics of how people work together are interfering with their ability to work well together;
- Facilitating periodic review sessions to identify how a strategy or reorganisation is progressing;
- Providing ongoing 1:1 Executive Coaching support to those charged with implementing change.
To be clear on what we’re not
Staff College are (unfortunately) not here to provide the answers for you. We believe the people best placed to decide on the future for your service, are those of you involved in leading it.
Our role is to help you to engage the people you need to, to hold the discussions required and to make the most of your collective time, in order to develop commitment for the way you choose to go ahead.
“Staff College initially supported and helped Barts Health in its early days of great challenges. The key recipe we benefitted from was the Staff College focus on both content (what is done or said) and process (the unspoken dynamic of how leaders and teams engage).
Staff College was adept at helping us safely confront challenges especially in process and directly facilitated senior teams – including the Executive team in the early post-merger period.
Meanwhile, their cohort development for individuals was also very powerful and impacted colleagues in a way other development interventions seldom do. The learning that leadership is doing the right thing on a difficult day has stuck with many of us since.”
Michael Pantlin | Chief People & Digital Officer
Surrey Heartlands Health & Care Partnership