• 2.1: Talent Management
• 2.2: Learning & Development
  • 2.2.1: Employee Engagement
  • 2.2.2: Building Management Talent
  • 2.2.3: Managing to Motivate
  • 2.2.4: Managing for Performance
  • 2.2.5: Building a Performance Team
  • 2.2.7: Case Studies

    • Current page is 2.2.7.1: Shepherds Bush Housing

  • 2.2.8: Conference Centre
• 2.3: Interim Services
• 2.4: Business Consultancy

Building a Management Team

When Shepherds Bush Housing Group (SBHG) failed an assessment for Investor in People (IIP) in 2006, the housing association discovered that its managers were failing to inspire their teams. They were unsure how to manage the performance of their staff and those staff couldn’t identify areas of management support.

The incoming director of HR & business support, David Blackburn, drafted a strategic plan and invited the Triangle Partnership to collaborate on a major change-management project to improve the operational capability of its managers.

After plenty of hard work, SBHG soon passed the IIP kitemark, repeating its success in 2008. But Blackburn – who is ambitiously plotting its future as London’s best housing association – began to create the culture change that would foster an enduring and supportive environment for its managers to flourish.

Early results have been impressive. Blackburn says he and Triangle’s managing partner Cathy Walsh first developed “a shopping list of values, competencies and behaviours for SBHG, asking our staff what they identified with”. The exercise resulted in 10 competencies covering three levels of staff, with senior managers expected to show ability in all 10.

“The competency framework was a fundamental change,” says Blackburn. “It informed a whole new performance review system, which includes our managers receiving practical recruitment training from Triangle that uses dummy candidates to assess their interviewing skills.”

Walsh began a cycle of psychometric assessment and feedback, which helped SBHG to notice that its staff weren’t interacting enough with each other. “The Belbin tests helped us to unpick lots of things about how differences of opinion impacted on our collective work,” he adds.

The housing group’s employees agreed on several concrete changes to their working structure. These included moving from fortnightly to monthly meetings, agreeing that no meeting would pass three hours, holding them in different places, starting them with everyone knowing the main purpose, and giving fast feedback.

“We also made strong commitments to talk more and email less,” says Blackburn. “After two months the office was completely different. People were enjoying getting up to talk about tricky subjects rather than playing laborious email ping-pong. All of those changes were a direct result of a Triangle-facilitated exercise to help us get there.”

Shortly afterwards, he asked Triangle to design a Building Management Talent programme, which included an audit of employee engagement, 360 degree feedback, an 18-month learning and development programme and feedback to the senior management team to ensure that initiatives are carried forward.

“We developed managers so they would instigate change”

“We agreed to develop managers so they would become the catalyst for instigating change throughout the organisation,” says Christine Newton, Triangle’s learning and development partner. “Rather than deciding content, I designed a framework with no idea about the outcome. I conducted a process of change within individuals by facilitating their engagement.”

Newton says change is a slow, organic process. “We talked about a journey, not an event. We’re often asked to give a few days’ training time but that wouldn’t work here. Short training only has a momentary effect. It’s like eating candyfloss: you take a mouthful, swallow it and then it’s gone. We wanted them to chew toffees instead.”

Happy with their progress, Blackburn is keen to continue. “We need to ensure that the operational capability of our managers is strong. As such, Triangle is a strong weapon in my arsenal and it feels like an extension of the organisation.”

SBHG also noticed a dearth of cross-functional working, so it paired up managers to gain cross-organisational awareness and increase staff motivation. Every two months, Christine meets small groups of managers “knowingly selected” by Blackburn for their mix of personalities and attitudes.

“She is training them all to be coaches,” adds Blackburn. “Initially, they didn’t see their colleagues as people they could help. Katie, in my HR team, is matched with the repairs manager. They wouldn’t usually talk to each other but we want to create something that is SBHG specific, so each manager will be exposed to other areas of the business by the end of this cycle.”

The cycle has already prompted intangible improvements to management quality. “A healthy atmosphere is hard to quantify but it immediately became evident,” says Blackburn, who often receives emails from managers telling him that the programme is helping them to feel proud of their work.

“Triangle has enabled the senior management team to work together more strategically than we thought possible”

“Triangle has enabled the senior management team to work together more strategically than we thought possible,” he adds. “Instead of teaching transactional analysis and giving theory, Triangle took the time to understand our organisation and address our specific issues from the start.”

Many organisations create values, then put them in the drawer and forget about them, says Greg Brown, managing director at GB Executive Solutions. “Triangle is helping SBHG to reinforce those values and model that behaviour in everything they do, as opposed to merely paying lip service to them.”

The investment is creating an organisation whose workers want to stick around. Employee turnover at SBHG had fallen from almost 40% in 2007 to around 15% by the end of 2008. The Sunday Times’ Best Companies survey highlighted a raft of increased levels of employee satisfaction: 78% of employees felt positively about working at SBHG, 75% expressed satisfaction in the available learning and development opportunities, and 70% had seen an improvement in their managers’ performance.

Blackburn adds: “People say: ‘a bespoke training programme must be costing you a fortune’. But it’s actually cost effective. If I were to pick a training provider off the shelf, a management introductory course alone would cost £15,000. Instead, for what it would cost me to run non-tailored courses for five people, I get five days of Christine’s time in which she’s seeing 27 managers.”

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