Posted: 3 July 2019
As we continue to focus on ‘Developing managers’ during July, we take a look at how Future Directions CC is shaping personalised programmes to enable the development of new and aspiring managers and deputies. The case study can be found in our new ‘Developing new managers and deputies’ online guide.
Future Directions CIC is a values-based, high quality social care provider that offers personal care, supported living, domiciliary care services and care homes with nursing across the North West. Their directors discuss how good succession planning can safeguard the future of social care services.
Whilst external training can be great from a knowledge point of view, we felt it was important that we personalised leadership and management development around our own values, ways of working and policies.
Our succession planning pathway originated from focus groups with staff who wanted to know how to progress. A lot of our leadership and management training has had a big impact in helping our managers embed our values across the service. The training enabled leaders to have the skills and confidence to lead that cultural change which has ultimately resulted in higher levels of quality for the people we support.
We talk to our staff about career pathways from support worker to managers at the very beginning of their induction. Once they have completed their own induction and gained some experience, we also encourage support workers to develop their own leadership skills, including helping us to deliver inductions to new starters.
What we’ve done over the past 18 months is to develop the foundations of a more formalised leadership and management programme that we’re introducing. This will cover a number of objectives aimed at every level of management, starting with aspiring managers and covering what they need to do.
We’ve created a support plan for our aspiring managers that sets out that when you move up through the organisation here are the skills, values and behaviours that you need to demonstrate.
We publish our programme for the year ahead so that our deputy managers, deputy team managers, team managers and others can plan their learning and development at the earliest opportunity.
Our leadership and management programmes are proving successful and supporting retention. We have very few deputies or team managers leaving the organisation. Staff know there is a career pathway for them at Future Directions CIC.
Future Directions CIC has developed a leadership and management programme that offers a range of short courses that can be undertaken across the year as part of a full programme or selected as individual sessions.
The sessions are delivered through a mix of internal managers and external learning providers and covers:
- performance management
- sickness and absence management
- resilience at work
- investigating for managers
- investigations for senior managers
- supervision and appraisal
- disciplinary and grievance
- Lead to succeed leadership programme
- values workshop for managers
- conflict management
- Positive Behaviour Support for managers.
Find out more
- Future Directions CIC features in our new online guide around succession planning: ‘Developing new managers and deputies’. We’ve also produced a recommended pathway for developing managers and deputies that includes suggested timeframes and associated funding through the Workforce Development Fund. You can access it here.
- You can also follow our June/July campaign around ‘Developing managers’ here and on Twitter at #DevelopingManagers