Client stories: Home Office

This article is filed under: leadership, leadership development, organisational performance, transformational leadership

Lifting leadership capability

Critical capability improvement

A recent Capability Review of the Home Office identified leadership of people as an area of weakness. The Board and Permanent Secretary chose Stanton Marris to work with the top 140 leaders of the Home Office over nine months to raise individual and organisational performance. A high-impact live coaching session for the selection panel was an early demonstration of the power of our experiential approach.

But there was initial resistance from the wider group, whose overall leadership culture was strongly analytical. Our approach was collaborative, setting up a steering group of participants who worked in partnership with us to refine leadership input and practice to engage these very busy senior leaders.

Breakthroughs

We found ourselves repeating words which have since become a touchstone when working with analytical leaders: ‘Easy to understand, but hard to do.’ It was the practical application of good practice that generated real insights and commitment to behaviour change, not leadership theories or models.

One of many breakthroughs came when Directors began to coach each other as they worked with specially trained actors to practise performance conversations and giving feedback.

The shift

By the end of the programme, the Directors had become a cohesive leadership group, learning from and supporting each other, and committed to maintaining this change from their history of mutual suspicion and internal competiveness. They had learned to listen to and challenge each other, and their direct reports, in a way that had simply not been done before.

Strongly positive evaluation led to the work being extended to 200 Deputy Directors, who reported their own observations of measurable improvements in their line managers’ performance.