Public Service Strengthens Employee Skill Sets

Public Service Employees Strengthen Communication, Leadership and Teamwork Skills

When new departments or branches are created in the public sector, people feel the pinch of high levels of change. A newly formed Information and Management branch brought together people from disparate areas and other ministries and in early 2011 sought to improve employee engagement, reduce stress and build teamwork.

At the team level, Insights for Personal Effectiveness was delivered in two full-day sessions. Participants increased self-awareness, built on team strengths, improved communications within the team and developed a better understanding of other members. They developed ways to adapt and connect with individuals who have different communication styles and needs.

The management team addressed critical leadership goals including rebuilding the team climate and increasing the levels of employee engagement in a subsequent session. An awareness of the group’s diversity as highlighted by the Branch team wheel served as a powerful foundation for the management team to accurately focus leadership efforts on building engagement. Discovering Team Effectiveness was deployed as a way to dive deeper into the branch culture and provided a context for aligning individual leaders, helping to understand their impact on the branch as well as the various sub-teams. Key leadership tools included the 4P’s of Communication(Purpose, People, Picture, Plan) and the D-4 decision matrix (Data, Depth of Feeling, Dramatic Interpretation, What we will Do).

And the result? Managers now have a sense of the corporate culture and how to better adapt and connect to influence for success. Team members better understand the overall team dynamic as well as the strengths and diversity of their sub-team components. Participants have a new sense of both interpersonal communications, including do’s and don’ts, as well as overall corporate communications using the Insights models.

For more information about developing your team, please contact us.

Team effectiveness, team work , 4 P’s of Communication, communication effectiveness, communication styles, diversity, Anne Bishop, Joyce Gwilliam,