London South Bank University

Personal Development Training Partner

Context

London South Bank University (LSBU) is one of London’s largest and oldest universities – providing vocationally-relevant, accredited and professionally recognised education since 1892. Today, it forms part of the newly-established LSBU Group, an innovative, ambitious and community-focused establishment that includes local academies and colleges in a shared vision: “To transform lives, communities, businesses and society through applied education and insight.” A key strength of LSBU is its ability to enhance student success and deliver real world impact through academic activity and links to business and the professions.

Objectives

Since the beginning of 2017, Eliesha has been working with LSBU’s Organisational Development (OD) team to support their objectives as a strategic enabler and learning partner, ensuring they have the right resources, systems and infrastructure to deliver their strategy and support cultural change across the institution. This contract has been both extended and re-awarded to us via open competition, indicating the organisation’s satisfaction with our work.

Eliesha’s key aims have been to:

• work in partnership with the OD team to streamline the delivery of the LSBU L&D Programme
• align all learning to LSBU’s values and leadership behavioural framework.

It has also been essential for the programme to ensure that staff not only developed the skills they needed to step up and contribute to the Corporate Strategy in order to achieve the university’s ambitions. The focus for learning is to create an environment that attracted and fostered the very best of staff, and within which staff felt proud of their University and took appropriate responsibility for their development.

Solution(s)

To date, a range of relevant and tailored courses have been designed and delivered. Topics covered have included:

As part of the merger of the University with an FE College and academy, we designed and delivered an Integration Programme workshop series. This was in support of a new Group identity, and focussed on managing the transition, high performance and collaboration across the different organisations which were coming together to form a cohesive Group. Development was aimed at both change managers and leaders across the new Group.

In support of the University’s new academic mentoring initiative, we facilitate mentorship workshops for mentors and mentees to support effective social learning for academic talent. 

In consultation with managers and OD, Eliesha designed and delivered specific courses to address challenges within five individual teams. This required a combination of bespoke, solution focussed workshops developing both skills and behaviours. Each team required a unique intervention to support development of a more proactive and customer-focussed approach. These events included elements of both challenge and co-creation with the team in order to build a more empowered, productive and accountable culture. One of the events was so successful that the team requested quarterly follow-up events.

The introduction of ILM Certificates in Coaching and Mentoring at levels 5 and 7 was designed to shift HR advice to a more consultative approach and it enabled the University to build their coaching culture and develop internal coaching capacity and provide new development opportunities to staff.

Consultancy

Eliesha is currently supporting LSBU in embedding their new competency framework into recruitment and selection. This included writing policy and extensive managers’ guidance to ensure that leaders can put the competency framework into practice consistently.

The project includes designing the roll-out workshop and building internal facilitation capacity and knowledge transfer. This means that the managers’ training workshops can be delivered internally in the future, leading to substantial ongoing savings.  

Outcomes

The evaluation results to date have been excellent, exceeding 95% against all scores.

The content has been very well received. Delegates are keen to learn. They are engaged and have provided good feedback both on enjoyment and interest and on the value of the programmes. Mapping and linking the material to LSBU’s values, and tailoring the language and approach to the University has supported this very effectively; the materials are seen as relevant and appropriate and the programmes have received significant numbers of returning delegates.

Collaboration and partnership working with the LSBU team is very good where we have built good relationships and excellent support.

We supported the University in transitioning their learning provision to virtual delivery in 2020, providing continuity in learning opportunities. We also adapted or designed leadership courses to support managers working with remote teams and later within a hybrid setting.

Example Delegate Comments:

“I found that the session was well planned and organised. The facilitator was fair and consistent, allowing everyone the opportunity to participate. Great eye contact kept me focused. Excellent training and would recommend this to other staff members. Catering was good and venue was nice size. Great session! Looking forward to more. I think the facilitator did well with communicating information.“

“Really enjoyed the session and gained many new ideas and concepts of how to be more collaborative for students and colleagues.“

“Great trainer, lots of examples and clear theoretical knowledge.“

“Very good speaker – making it relevant to individuals. Highly recommend. Very beneficial.“

“This was the best facilitated event I have ever attended“

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