What have we been working on these past two months?

With annual leave, training, a new training tracker in development and an audit it has been all go, which is why I'm a month behind on my updates; this means I have a lot to share! As you’ll know from my previous update, I have been working on pulling together the results from our leadership survey and our two leadership development days and I’m pleased to share the results with you.

Leadership Survey

The survey looked at 6 areas of leadership (see pic above) - clear strengths across all levels of leadership were team environment, support and clarity. This indicates staff feel safe to speak up and their team work well together; our line managers are approachable and make themselves available, and our objectives and responsibilities are communicated well to us. The two areas that have shown room for improvement are coaching and feedback. Coaching our team members to work through problems, having development conversations and providing team members with useful feedback in a timely manner. This data will help shape our development strategy moving forward.

Leadership Development Days

Our leaders were invited to one of two in-person training days. The morning, we were joined by Sandra Howarth from Disruptive HR; Sandra delivered an interactive session focusing on coaching conversations and providing practical tools and frameworks to support leaders. Although organised separately, the coaching conversations aligned nicely with the survey results. The afternoon was spent looking at what training, support and resources TT currently offers its leaders and where the gaps lie, to help shape what our leadership development programme will look like.

What’s next?

How we approach L&D is changing, as we now have a workforce made up of multiple generations (baby boomers, Gen X, Millennials Gen Z) and each will have their own needs and aspirations. The information from both the survey and our leader’s days will form a framework that will help everyone develop; whether that be staying within your current role and becoming the best you can be (not everyone wants to move up the career ladder), support aspiring and current leaders to gain the knowledge and skills they need and ensuring the organisation has the talent and skills it needs to grow.

What are we currently doing?

Based on these results I’ve started to put a few things in place. Firstly, as mentioned above I’m working on a framework and strategy for how we will support growth and development across TT. Secondly, leader’s peer reflection sessions have started again with the first session haven taken place at the end of July. Peer reflection is a great opportunity for our leaders to come together to reflect on experiences, gain support and share their own knowledge and insight. Thirdly, I’m running workshops on personal development plans (PDPs), where we’ll look at the value of using a PDP, how to formulate clear and meaningful goals and look at opportunities beyond formal training. This is just the beginning of a larger piece of work looking at how we can support and nurture the talent we have across TT. As always, I value your input and I will be reaching out to work collaboratively on specific elements of the framework as we move forward.

What else?

We have a new self-guided CPD module available, called Supporting Mental Wellbeing Through Nutrition, which looks at the relationship between food, mood and gut health. This is available to access on Totem > People’s Portal > Training and on the link below. A huge shout out to Karen Nicolao who developed this module.