Stuart Duthie is an IT leader with 13 years’ experience in senior and director-level positions. As a permanent employee and then as an interim consultant, he has helped several organisations transform IT functions and achieve considerable improvements to engagement and productivity. As a qualified coach, Stuart brings a broad array of tools and approaches to his practice, enabling him to achieve these impressive results.
Today Stuart is talking through a specific recent example that resulted in a 36% increase to staff engagement within 9 months, evidenced through internal staff survey. This also had a positive impact on customer satisfaction and overall productivity.
The Detail
Starting scenario
- A team of people who were in “victim” or “powerless” mode
- Energy spent on describing what was wrong rather than fixing it, or just following process
- Senior managers who become jaded and moved on
- Morale/energy/enthusiasm problem, but high pressure on delivery
- Mixed response from people from delivering just their bits, to working-to-time….not feeling joined up as a team
- Separate programme of work, with part of team located away from the main team
Key components of the 36% increase in engagement
- Make sure you get the communication right and ensure a clear sense of purpose
- Take a different approach, let go as a manager and instead facilitate and lead
- Engage senior leaders first, checking a shared understanding and creating a plan to do something different… by doing something different. Understand and demonstrate “Acts of Leadership”
- Build sustainability in what you are doing: Make sure that activities and energy from events such as away days continue back in the office
- A step-by-step approach to building confidence and resourcefulness in improvement
- Leadership models such as leadership mindset and capability models to understand where you need to improve and Myers-Briggs to consider ways of engaging extrovert and introvert thinkers
Outcomes
- Mastery
- Self-defined improvement themes
- 3 x practice-development forums
- Purpose (Clear Direction)
- Clarity of goals and roles
- Provenance of objectives
- Broader range of projects in portfolio, with greater lead from within the team
- Autonomy
- A team defining their improvement themes
- ….and creating their own team objectives
This resulted in a 36% increase in staff engagement, 25% in process enablement and 10% in customer satisfaction
Resources and contact details
Stuart’s LinkedIn profile – https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartduthie
More details blogs on the subject written by Stuart:
- Initiating Change – You can’t start a fire without a spark
- Growing Sustainable Change
- The Result (getting a 36% increase in staff engagement)
