Client overview
Anglicare Sydney is a not-for-profit organisation supporting people at all stages of life, including foster care, residential care and retirement living. Covering a large geographic area including Sydney, Blue Mountains, Southern Highlands, Illawarra, Shoalhaven and Northern Inland, they have over 4,000 employees who support their local communities and residents.
The challenges
The people and culture teams at Anglicare were keen to partner with an organisation that could work with them to build a highly-tailored, co-designed development program. They wanted to increase leadership capability across the organisation, focusing on coaching skills.
The solution
While Anglicare has its own Learning & Development (L&D) team, they were working on other projects and priorities. They needed an external partner to deliver a solution in a short timeframe. Having an external partner to design and deliver a tailored program would provide expertise and capacity for the L&D team.
We recommended a coaching framework based on our experience with different approaches. We built a tailored program for leaders to be delivered in pilot format within six weeks of the proposal being signed off by Anglicare.
Called the ‘Think Lead Create’ (TLC) Coaching Program, the pilot incorporated:
- Design and facilitation of a two-day intensive leadership coaching ‘lab’
- Pre-program communications and associated pre-work
- A pre-and post-program survey to measure participant experience with coaching both before and after the program
- Design and collation of TLC branded program materials including workbooks, pens, notebooks and desktop resources
- A six-month program of communications and resources to be delivered to participants in monthly instalments post-leadership lab
- Design and facilitation of an additional half-day session at the end of the program to ensure reflection and embedment of knowledge
“I have had the pleasure of working closely with Stacey and Jules from Seed People Consulting over the past three months. They’ve worked with my organisation for the past six years. They are strong coaches, learning designers and facilitators. I definitely recommend working with them and look forward to continuing our work in the future.”
Rachel Watt, Learning & Development Manager
Anglicare
Following the pilot session, we made further adjustments to the program based on participant feedback. We then finalised it to deliver to the wider organisation.
To ensure the Anglicare L&D team were capable and confident in delivering the program without our assistance, the project also included a ‘Train the Trainer’ element. This meant we could set the team up for success. They wouldn’t have to rely on us to deliver the training in future.
During COVID, they asked us to adjust and adapt the program to a virtual environment. This was delivered to a cohort of leaders across their locations, providing resources and adaptability in a challenging environment.
We partnered with the Anglicare L&D team again in 2022 to refresh and reimagine the’ Think Lead Create’ coaching program. We redesigned the six-month program in 10 weeks, and delivery and learning resources were updated and refreshed. We also facilitated the delivery of three new learning sessions in the new methodology.
The results
The ‘Think Lead Create’ program was run a total of 16 times from 2018 to 2020. We were asked to return to co-facilitate each of these additional sessions.
Facilitation of post-implementation review session with Anglicare, with 93% of participants stating that they either strongly agreed or agreed that the TLC program was a valuable use of their time.
Within the first 12 months after the launch of TLC, direct reports to program participants saw an increase of 10% in the number of coaching sessions.
