Helping to instil consistency at management level

Background
ShareAction is a charity which evolved out of a project by People & Planet in 2005, with a mission to harness the power of the financial system to tackle big environmental and social challenges through responsible investment.

The charity has a number of managers at different levels of experience and numbers have grown quite rapidly, meaning they no longer had capacity to deliver their quarterly management training courses in-house. They also wanted something more structured and more charity/ESG focused rather than corporate, so they started looking for an external training provider and saw the range of training modules offered by Action Planning. Our flexible “pick and mix” module approach suited their needs ideally and so they chose us to deliver the training.

Brief
Our HR, recruitment and training lead Tracy Madgwick took the brief from Senior People Team Officer Alison Fuller and People Business Partner Amy Webster. They wanted us to deliver a range of workshops that would enable and equip their managers to be able to effectively manage their teams in quite pressurised situations. They chose five modules: Introduction to Line Management, Delegation, Giving Feedback and Having Courageous Conversations, Managing Stress and Burnout, and Coaching Skills for Line Managers.

Process
Tracy worked with Amy and Alison to scope out the modules. She then put the workshops together with Action Planning colleague Natasha Chadwick, who delivered the first four courses before taking time out to have a baby. This break allowed Amy and Alison to take stock before another Action Planning Associate, Esme Russell, delivered the coaching skills workshop.

One of the learnings from the initial courses was to rearrange the training groups based on experience, so that everyone was at the same level.

Attendance was compulsory for the first four course, delivered to three groups of 12, while the last, Coaching Skills for Line Managers, was voluntary, with 24 people choosing to attend in two groups.

The courses were followed up with supporting resources, including videos and hand-outs.

Outcome
“Most people came away having learned something valuable,” said Alison. “They really appreciated the interactive tasks, the chance to come together and having that space to share experiences. Some people really loved the theory, others really loved the interaction. We’ve had requests from people for a bit of a refresher.

“The coaching skills module probably received the best response because it was optional. That worked out really well. If we run this again next year we’ll do Action Planning’s modules and then follow up internally with sessions on how to apply these principles to ShareAction’s way of doing things.

Consultant’s insight
Whenever you run a development programme for the first time, there is always lots of learning that comes out of it and you really need to run it for a second time to learn from the first time and iron out the kinks. Then you've got a programme that really works.

So we are looking forward to working with ShareAction again to refine the training delivery in response to what we learnt from this case. For example, spacing the modules out more to allow people time to process information before moving on the next module. Also, as Alison said, thinking about having the right groups of managers together, so you don’t have very senior managers in the same group as very new ones.

We were delighted with the feedback overall and look forward to working with Alison and Amy again to fine tune the training for next time.