Primeast

Client

A City Council in the United Kingdom

Project

Develop leadership skills

Business, Background & Objectives

The challenge for the City Council was how to make sure it’s Leadership Team was working together effectively to fully utilise all the skills and resources of their organisation. In a vast and disparate organisation, with employees ranging from refuse collectors to children service care-workers, the council wanted the capability to recognise and develop the skills, talents and ambitions of all their employees. The hope was that this would enable them to become an employer of choice in the region, as well as help fill the posts that traditionally, and with increasing demands, they had found difficult to fill. The council knew it had the latent talents and skills already within the organisation, and they approached us to facilitate and develop a culture that would help them tap into these resources and gain real added value for them, and their employees.

Our role

Primeast delivered a medium-term Leadership intervention that used the Talent Liberation philosophy, working with the entire City Council Leadership Team. Our approach was to work with them to progress through the four key stages of Talent Liberation (TL), initially applying the learning to themselves, and then moving to how to apply it within the management of their teams.

A year after the initial delivery of the programme, our follow up research discovered some fantastic illustrations of how the Talent Liberation approach had added value, right throughout the organisation.

Results

One of the most significant outcomes from the programme was that members of the Leadership Team now consciously and actively use the approach in their own teams, and encourage their department managers to do the same. One leading executive had used the approach on a graduate mentee, believing that the approach was “fantastic for someone at the early stages of their career, where employees have a tendency to start jobs with no real idea of what they are good at and what their strengths are. The Talent Liberation approach helps provide clarity and vision that is so useful in their future development.”

In one of the departments, the Talent Liberation approach of recognising, developing and using employee’s talents had brought great value. The previous four Personal Assistants (PAs) in the department had all moved onto senior positions elsewhere within the organisation. This was facilitated by the team they worked for, who helped them recognise their talents and enabled them to move to various diverse roles. Of the previous PAs, one was highly skilled with IT systems, so she was moved so that she is now leading a team in charge of payroll for the whole organisation. Another previous PA, who had a great talent with relationships has moved to be an Employee Relations Consultant, and one has moved to be a Quality and Diversity Manager. The most recent PA now leads a team in the Elections Management Department. The department head told us “We have enabled them to use these talents to all go off in different directions into some important and diverse roles. This has been a great success for us and an example of how Talent Liberation has been taken on.” The increasing adoption of the new leadership philosophy within the organisation has slowly driven away an old culture of ‘don’t think above your paygrade,’ and now promotes a much more collaborative and communicative approach.

Perhaps one of the most powerful examples of how TL brought a business benefit was seen with the role of the Head of Communications at the City Council. Through evaluating her strengths and talents by herself and with her peers, she was able to recognise that she brought greatest value to the organisation through the things she had been doing outside of the office. In attending social events, building relationships and networking, she brought fantastic positive media for the council. The area where she brought the least value was in the management of her team. Through the TL approach she felt comfortable acknowledging this, admitting that she really didn’t enjoy the responsibility of management. As a result her job role was adjusted to ensure that she was able to play to her strengths, and to remove the burdens of the role that she had previously struggled with. As one of her peers described the process, “all of this recognition came from the TL process. It helped her, her peers, and her team all recognise her fantastic strengths and value, but also how we could manage her role so she was able to add even more”.