If you’d like to know more about how we helped the University of Nottingham embed its culture give Craig a call because he’ll happily chat (and then chat some more!)
The University of Nottingham Finance Department was experiencing significant change, requiring the department’s managers to operate more as leaders. This meant stepping up to empower their teams, letting go of the detail and focusing on a leadership approach as opposed to team supervision. To add to the complexity, several new teams were forming and existing teams were reforming. They approached us as they wanted to partner with an external leadership and behaviours expert to drive their development and help them deliver the required culture change.
We facilitated focus groups and one-to-ones with senior leaders, managers and a cross-section of the frontline. We concentrated on what was working well, what wasn’t and what they wanted their future culture to be like. Quite quickly, we were able to identify the types of interventions which would ensure maximum impact and deliver the required culture change. We then designed and delivered a series of development workshops for managers and leaders, focusing on emotional intelligence, feedback, coaching and developing teams.
Our activities were phenomenally well received; we provided timely, bespoke development and strategic guidance. The managers have now visibly stepped up as leaders by taking accountability, creating an empowered environment, encouraging more from their teams and thinking strategically.
Our partnership work has become the foundation for all future development within the wider Finance community. Ongoing leadership coaching and feedback is now the norm.
The culture change continues to this day with frequent reviews to analyse what’s changed and what needs to improve even further.
The development challenge and guidance we provided helped the managers to identify the culture, behaviours required to lead the team and to feel empowered to own and deliver this culture change.
We ran a series of interactive focus groups and engaging leadership events for the managers, which were a mix of face-to-face and online sessions, all resulting in techniques the managers could choose to apply immediately with their teams.
We remained agile in our approach to ensure we were always able to adapt to the University’s changing needs, priorities and environment. These events gave the managers the skills and behaviours to become even more effective leaders. These also built their confidence and competence to own and drive their own teams’ development.
We also partnered with the managers to build their confidence, so they were able to deliver co-designed workshops to their frontline teams. They brought their teams up to speed with the culture work, crafted it even more with their teams’ input and worked out how they would live and breathe this in their daily roles.
They defined what ‘great’ looked like and how they needed to work together to continue to deliver for their customers and achieve the newly defined culture.
“I have found Rambutan to have a very engaging style. They have built a rapport with the team very quickly and find innovative ways of ‘ice breaking’ to make people feel more confident and at ease and therefore more willing to engage with the topic at hand. I would also say that Rambutan have been incredibly flexible and adaptable as well as appreciative of our resource and time pressures and any change in plan or approach has been understood and delivered without a change in cost. They are passionate about people and that comes across very clearly in all of the interactions I have had with them and are very genuine in their approach, which has resulted in very positive feedback from the Finance teams.”