Forty people leaders went first, the executive team and their direct reports. Two hundred and forty more followed across four more sessions. Nothing had been written down yet.
The challenge
The council employs around 1,500 people. It needed a leadership capability framework, and five programmes built on it, running from leading yourself up to leading the organisation. Taituarā runs leadership programmes for council staff around the country, so a council is not short of options. What this one wanted was something in its own words.
The executive had a condition. The framework had to use words its own people leaders would actually say, in an ordinary conversation with their staff. So the executive decided those managers should write it rather than receive it.
What we did
Council staff shaped the content through workshops, a leadership conference, and four sessions with an internal design team working on the framework. We ran the process, sorted the material and wrote the drafts, then showed people where their contribution had gone.
Managers recognised their own wording in the drafts. We never had to run a campaign to introduce it.
The outcome
The final framework sets out the leadership behaviours and personal qualities the council expects. Five programmes sit under it, five days each, with lesson plans, slides and workbooks. The council approved all five after three rounds of drafting, on time and on budget. Because the programmes run from self leadership up to executive leadership, every staff member attends at least one of them.
Managers had already worked through the framework in the workshops, at the conference and across the drafts, so nobody had to be persuaded of it afterwards. One study of change programmes found that people who help plan a change are more likely to say it reached their daily work, and less likely to push back on it.
The trust built during the design paid off later. Facilitators could change content for a particular cohort without anybody worrying the framework was being watered down, because everybody already knew where it had come from.
What transfers to other councils
You do not need 280 people to get the benefit, but the people who will use the framework do need to recognise their own work and language in it. The workshops were the easy part. The work that took time was earning trust with a lot of managers, then showing them which suggestions had been kept, which had changed and why. Skip that and you are back to a framework in a folder.
