A team from Bath Consultancy Group is working through the Centre for Excellence in Leadership to help shift performance cultures in three Further Education colleges that are wanting to move from ‘Satisfactory' through ‘Good' to ‘Excellent'.  

Lynne Sedgmoor, the Chief Executive of CEL, believes that the whole system approach taken by Bath is what is needed for colleges who are not finding that performance target driven or competency approaches alone, can help them make the shifts necessary for this stage in their journeys.

Led by Danny Chesterman, the team is using a number of methodologies in combination to mobilise the shifts both within and beyond the leadership teams.  At one college of FE, John Watters ran a culture simulation workshop based on the work of Barry Oshry, and early signs are that this has been catalytic in helping people develop a shared language for seeing the system they are in, and start to move to a position of taking responsibility instead of blaming others;

• "I will remember my experience of being a Top for the rest of my life - it wasn't a role play.  An amazing microcosm of life - the lessons will stay with me."  Peter  White, Director of Customer Services & Marketing, Gloucester College of Arts & Technology  

• "I found the day of real value to me and I was the biggest sceptic before I walked in." Andy Arkell, Head of School, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Gloucester College of Arts & Technology

The team is also using dilemma methodology, to surface the stuckness that can so often take hold in public service contexts, where there are many competing interests to be served. The point is that either position in a dilemma is likely to be wrong.  Sometimes the best way through can be a both and position, but with patient inquiry we are finding more often that a third position, which transcends the either/or and the both/and position is possible. Here are some examples: 

Colleges all need, and want, external perspectives from those outside the college in order to strengthen community and employment links.  However they often experience those externals as oppressive judges of their work....anything but allies in a shared endeavour. One position that transcends this dilemma is the notion of the critical friend...someone who gets alongside you and takes the trouble to understand the world as you see it, whilst as the same time as both offering, and accepting, challenge.

Another dualistic pattern is one we have termed parent/child.  Here leadership teams often experience others as telling them what to do in a way that is reminiscent of a parent child dynamic.  The pattern can then be replicated, out of awareness, elsewhere in the college, with staff experiencing leadership teams in the same way.  

Rather than switch into a parent/child response the work we are doing seeks to draw out the notion of top leadership as lead learners; people who have the courage to say what they don't know but at the same time lead the way by their own actions and making their own learning public.

The work is developing clarity around the mindsets that liberate and limit ways of seeing and therefore choices for action. As we develop this with staff in colleges, we will make it available on the BCG website as a piece of work in progress.