Bioss UK – A Bioss Affiliate Company – United Kingdom

Case Study

Helping Leaders Lead – Facilitating Transformation with the Tripod of Work and Career Path Appreciation

The Client

An independent charitable development and humanitarian organisation that advances children’s rights and equality for girls, with a presence in over 75 countries. Their strategy is to work with vulnerable children and especially girls so that they can learn, lead, decide and thrive. Within the strategy they have an ambition to transform the lives of 100 million girls. Child sponsorship and grassroots community work are central to their strategy and achieving this ambition.

The Challenge

The organisation had just launched a new five-year strategy, moving from more traditional humanitarian and child-focused work to that of advocacy and influence in improving the lives of 100 million girls.  

Their key challenges were to appreciate how the strategy would change their leadership requirements and to identify the development that would be required, both of people and of the organisation itself.

The Work

Bioss UK’s work was to: 

  • Support the Senior Leadership Team in understanding how their work would change and what capabilities would be required to deliver their strategy, identifying gaps and development actions. 
  • Provide a picture for each senior leader of their current knowledge, skills and capability, and how that would change over time, in terms of both individual growth and organisational requirements. This facilitated their personal development plans, based on the outcome of the Bioss evaluations and conversations.
  • Help the organisation to appreciate the talent they had and how that would change over time.
  • Ensure the necessary systems and processes were introduced to effect positive transformation in understanding what people were saying about their leadership in relation to the strategic aims. 
  • Provide ongoing support after the initial programme, including workshops, recruitment of new senior leaders both internally and externally, and developing in-house skills to provide continuity.   

The process followed was to deliver a programme to over 100 international and regional leaders, including workshops with the Executive Team, based on the following models:

  • The Working Relationships Appreciation to explore working relationships by gathering data and information from leaders and those who reported to them, to identify development areas.
  • Personality assessment using Linked Personal Appreciation in relation to teamwork, conflict handling, work styles, learning styles and managerial style.
  • Career Path Appreciation for one-to-one appreciations of an individual’s capability  to handle uncertainty and greater complexity and to make effective decisions, as well as understanding of how that capability will grow over time.

Benefits to the Client

These included: 

  • Clarification of the new strategy’s impact on the organisation. 
  • Provision of clear guidelines for the Transformation Workshops, with each region discussing regional priorities and application of the strategy – leading to grounded, practical plans.
  • A shift from the channelling of decisions upwards to a leadership model that valued local and regional accountability.
  • Improved role clarity, with clear purpose and explicit standards of delivery,  improved decision-making accountability, and reset spans of control.
  • Improved succession management for the organisation, both current and future.
  • Managers providing more guidance and review to people, as well as improved feedback on performance through the Bioss “Tending, Tasking and Trusting” leadership framework.

For more information, please contact Peter Taylor.