work examples
In this section:

advancing organisation culture
developing third party relationships
large group team development
leadership coaching program
facilitating self-directed team working

work examples

facilitating self-directed team working

“Liberating Potential has been offering a flexible and professional service to our organisation for several years.  We have developed a trusting business relationship with them during this time.  They have the ability to get deep into our thinking, our strategy and our organisation’s needs to develop tailored organisation development activities for us.” 
Learning and Development Manager, HR Division

The Marketing Division of a national charity with approximately 70 people had been organised into self-directed teams since 1996. This approach facilitated a creative and responsive Marketing Team that was highly successful in achieving business goals. The self-directed team structure had been through a number of changes since inception in order to continuously improve effectiveness. However, there were issues associated with the flat structure way of working that needed to be resolved. These included:

• Roughly more than two-thirds of the Division were not part of the original move to self-directed team working – understanding of and buy-in to the model was mixed
• There was a lack of consistency in how the model was applied across the Division
• There was a lack of structured opportunities for training and career development

Improving the situation would obviously improve the chances of the ambitious member and income targets being met. Consequently Liberating Potential was asked to help review and develop the existing way of working. The main objectives for this assignment were to:

• Build understanding across the Division of the Marketing way of working
• Help identify problems
• Help identify solutions to problems
• Help implement changes

We did the following:

• Ran ‘focus groups’ with a cross section of the Division to make contact with people and get a better feel for the issues
• Designed and facilitated review workshops with each of the teams in the Division to increase understanding of the self-directed way of working and identify key issues
• Ran a large group process at a Divisional meeting where each of the teams brought their issues and proposals. This resulted in agreement on key development priorities
• Provided tailored facilitation skills training to key change leaders in the Division to help them take over future development of the way of working

This was a highly participative process, consistent with the Divisions way of working. It was very successful in engaging people and spawned a number of training interventions. We were subsequently engaged to coach leaders across the organisation.