Organisation Mission and Purpose
This service is offered in-house to organisations wishing to explore or review their practice, to plan their future direction, to look at how they’ll get there and assess what they’ll need in order to achieve this.Essentially we support organisations to develop a map that will chart their direction for the next number of months and years. We ask important probing questions and a session may follow something approximating to what follows below:
- If you could look one/three/five years down the line, what would be the ideal feedback you would get from your clients and service users?
- How much of this would you get right now?
- In order to get to your desired feedback, what do you need
- to start doing?
- stop doing?
- continue doing?
- In order to get to your desired feedback, what do you need
- What kind of skills and qualities do your staff need to possess to get there?
- How much of this do they currently possess?
- What ramifications does this exploration have for your training & development function?
- How does this piece of reflection affect recruitment policy going forward?
Developing Cohesion & Direction
The most successful groups and teams have two core traits – cohesion and a clear sense of direction. Cohesion refers to the sense that a group feels it is a group, that people feel a sense of membership, belonging and attachment to their group. They see it as something that is important to their lives; that they benefit from being members of; that they positively contribute to. Cohesion in a group or workplace is not guaranteed: a group becomes a group when people choose to belong to it. In short, one cannot command that a group simply form and be productive, there is a process of development needed for this to occur, and it needs to be nurtured thereafter.
Because this workshop is facilitated, the group members are encouraged to actively participate in the day. Working together in small and large groups, developing both answers and questions related to their organisation, they will find by day’s end that their sense of being a cohesive unit will have deepened significantly. This is to the benefit of the organisation and supports it to attain its goals.
Karl Popper declared that “clarity is always useful”, most especially when it comes to plans and future direction. It is easier to generate motivation and momentum when there is clarity of purpose, a clear sense of mission, a way of knowing if you are succeeding. Most importantly, if staff feel that they have an input into the company’s mission and direction then they will feel enhanced ownership and commitment to the plan, enhancing the chances of succeeding. The plan/mission/strategy will be commonly owned and will not simply emerge from a HR department as a chart on a wall.
Measuring success
In many Community & Voluntary organisations, measurement of outputs be challenging as many of their activities, like improving wellbeing, confidence and self-belief in clients, are qualitative outcomes and are not easily measured. Yet they do have quantitative effects. If clients feel welcomed and supported, understood and listened to, they will come – voluntarily - in increasing numbers. They will engage more fully and they will progress in greater numbers.
More often than not externally (funder) imposed KPI’s are best met by focusing not on the KPI’s themselves, but on how one operates, how one does things, and one does them that way. In short, focus on the performance and the results invariably follow.
Life is now
We are alive; it is a finite condition. It’s an enormity to consider life, being alive, being. We really have to slow down to take account of it. And often, we hurtle through our lives, or maybe muddle from one thing to the next, day by day. We don’t get those days back. We don’t, as a rule, take the time to stop and consider the big questions, usually not until we have a problem or a scare. On this programme we stop and take time to look at where we want our life to go, how we want it to be. When we live the life we want and are meant to live we thrive.
How to Proceed
Simply email us via our contact page or telephone us at 083 3482333 to book a day or half day session.