Agile Leadership Programme

The Role

31ten worked closely with the Head of Organisational Development & Effectiveness to understand the feedback from the previous programme, the council’s aspirations, and their assessment of key gaps in leadership capability. Using that information, together with our experience and expertise in leadership development, we designed a new programme that was completely aligned to the agile organisation model and drew on the latest progressive thinking about leadership and organisations. We jointly presented and tested the new design with a range of senior leaders to secure their support, buy-in and advocacy for the programme.

The programme was designed to be voluntary with applications invited from individuals rather than line managers to ensure people had the motivation and enthusiasm to commit to the programme. Line managers were required to sign off on participation and commit to ensuring participants were supported in attending.

The programme was launched with sponsorship from the Deputy Chief Executive in September 2021 and ran for 8 months, with 4 cohorts. It was a mixed programme of taught sessions (all day), peer learning, speed coaching, webinars, and self-directed learning to ensure continued focus and development between sessions. Participants were offered an online reflective journal to capture their learning through the programme. Every session was designed to enable attendees to practically “learn and apply” small changes back in the day job. Sustainable change happens when small changes are applied and practised every day. These small changes were discussed and challenged constructively at peer learning sessions. 

Year 1 was delivered completely online due to the pandemic, and we maximised the value of online collaborative tools through MS Teams to create a sense of community and learning amongst the participants.  We deliberately designed cohorts to create a mix of professions, age, experience, and gender to encourage learners to engage with diversity and realise the benefits it brings.  This was extremely effective, and the opportunity to meet people from other directorates was one of the most popular aspects of the programme and peer learning received strong feedback from the cohort as the diversity of challenge, insight and advice from colleagues was hugely valued. 

All materials were shared on the programme’s MS Teams site for participants to continue to access post-programme, and admin rights for the individual cohorts’ private chat channels were handed over to participants to sustain the new relationships and networking developed through the programme. 

Key Outcomes