Situation: Lady Gowrie Tasmania

Issues/Pain or Opportunity: The statewide organisation continually develops the skills of its Centre managers and with the continual demands and changes in the early childhood development sector, the CEO needs to provide leadership and change management skills to her managers.  Effective people management is crucial to staff retention and engagement.

Reasons: Changes in legislation; in class ratios; rostering of part-time staff; limited time to focus on manager skills all place demands on over-stretched centre managers.  Staff engagement survey indicates opportunities to improve communication with staff.

Capabilities needed: Tailored workshops to childhood education with significant facilitation rather than training to engage the managers who already have significant workloads.  Positively demonstrate how their people management approaches can improve staff communication and responsibility without adding dramatically more effort.

We provided: We provided a debrief of employee survey results to capture opportunities to engage and empower staff while addressing continual industry changes.  Then, we developed a series of management and leadership workshops and one-on-one coaching sessions for specific managers.

Result: Continual improvement in the employee engagement results in the following year.  Managers of centres empowered to address people management issues and development opportunities with their improved skill sets.  Change management, while challenging, has occurred with the far majority of staff aware and excited about the opportunities.  CEO and senior managers see problem-solving occur at the centre level rather than escalate to head office; this allows for more of a strategic focus of the senior team.