The Company
Seashell Trust are home to the Royal School Manchester, a non-maintained special school, and the Royal College Manchester, an independent specialist further education college. Both school and college are residential and together cater for students from the age of 2 to 25. Students who attend the school and college can access on site residential and short break facilities.
Seashell Trust deliver programmes of care that are individually tailored, promote independence, and help build confidence and self-esteem in the children and young people they work with.
The Business Situation
Seashell Trust were looking to develop the Leadership team to improve communication and engagement across the team and between the Executive Team and Operational Team. The team faced a number of challenges around ways of working and having a clear sense of purpose and vision and working cohesively together as a team.
The Approach
The workshop was highly participative using a coaching approach with the group to facilitate the agreed specific objectives. The day introduced the following activities:
- Reflection on the strategic aims and vision for Trust. Where they needed to be as an organisation and their role in achieving the aims; generating a clear vision with priorities and how to stay focussed
- Current reality review – What is going well as a team and needs to continue? What is not going well as a team and needs to reduce or stop? What needs further work?
- What are the barriers and challenges that are getting in the way of achieving the vision?
- What impact do these have both organisationally and personally? How do we overcome these challenges?
- Facilitated activities to identify the gaps and the critical steps to be taken; know where each department is and where it needs to be to achieve the vision. Culminating in an improvement plan and getting buy in and accountability for the plan
- Activities to identify the implications for the management team if there are no changes and agree roles and responsibilities for bringing about change.
The Benefits
- A greater awareness across the team of people’s roles and responsibilities; improved empathy and understanding of other’s pressures and ways of working
- Buy-in and agreement to the vision of the Trust and what it is they wanted to achieve which everyone committed to
- Improved communication, rather than emailing, the team made a commitment to talk and meet with others, bringing about greater engagement
- Celebrating successes! We don’t do enough of this, what is good about the Trust what can we do more of?
- A great understanding of the challenges of the Trust, and collectively addressing these and ways of moving forward
- Clarity around what needs to happen now to embed the changes and good practice within the team and across the Trust, how the team can build on the outcomes of the day
- Agreement to how the team will work together constructively in the future