Would you like to find out more about having confident conversations? Just give Mark a shout as he loves a chat on the success of our partnership work with A2Dominion.
A2Dominion, a housing association with social purpose who invest in their communities, launched their new Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) strategy. It soon became apparent that managers and leaders wanted help on how to structure sensitive and potentially difficult conversations around any EDI subject, however tough the topic. It was important for managers and leaders to have the confidence to broach difficult subjects and to support employee wellbeing. Building psychological safety was paramount to enable these conversations and they approached Rambutan with this in mind.
We spent time working with and listening to a cross-section of employees, to identify business challenges, skills gaps and other issues which were hindering progress. Then, in partnership with a clinical psychotherapist, we created a bespoke, blended development programme to be delivered virtually to over 250 managers and leaders.
After an initial pilot to test our approach, we delivered 36 ‘confident conversations’ workshops, starting with the Executive Management Team (EMT). These were all interactive, highly participative and engaging, and were followed up by a series of more informal ‘drop-in’ virtual sessions for all participants to share experiences and learning.
Managers and leaders have embraced a new way of thinking about EDI and psychological safety at A2Dominion. The simple question we suggested workshop participants ask their people, ‘How are you really?’ quickly became embedded as the starting point for some confident conversations. Here’s what one participant told us:
“The ‘confident conversations’ training has been extremely timely for me and my team. It opens you up as a manager and leader and even opens up your personal relationships to your blind spots. I can honestly say that the benefit to me and my team is transformational.”
Before designing our workshops, we researched what was already working well and what could be improved. We listened to managers, leaders, employees and the EDI steering group. We discovered:
Our challenge was how to fit a huge amount of content into the programme of workshops all delivered virtually to both experienced and newer managers and leaders.
Some of the topic areas (around wellbeing and psychological safety) lay slightly outside our normal leadership and management development offering. Therefore, in bringing this all together, we partnered with Rutland House Counselling and Psychotherapy to design a programme that would really hit the mark. While we weren’t training managers and leaders to be therapists, we knew that many of the skills and models that therapists needed as part of their professional development, such as listening, empathy and asking great questions, would be essential for managers and leaders.
Changing behaviour is what Rambutan is all about; it’s our raison d’être. Theory and models are important but not just for the sake of learning something theoretical – it must make a difference to what people do every day after the learning intervention.
We then designed the workshop programme below:
Workshop one – creating the right environment. As the foundations for creating psychological safety, we covered topics such as:
Workshop two – enabling the conversation. We focused on:
Workshop three – picking the right route of action. We focused on:
Our final ‘drop-in’ sessions offered an informal opportunity for workshop participants to meet again to share experiences, learnings and provide peer-to-peer support.
Supporting the whole programme in a blended approach was a plethora of targeted additional learning material such as book recommendations, video links to great TED Talks and other resources uploaded after each workshop to A2Dominion’s own learning management system.
“Since we delivered the programme, managers and leaders are still referring to what they have learned, and some have set up their own action learning sets to practise and refresh their skills, with employees noticing how managers and leaders are better equipped to discuss their challenges. This is a testament to Rambutan’s responsive, supportive and flexible approach. They are always professional, yet refreshing and fun when appropriate. We continue to work with them and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend them to others.”