The Staff Development Unit, based in the Department of Human Resources, has been shortlisted for a prestigious THE Award in the category ‘Outstanding Contribution to Leadership Development’.
This award recognises and rewards imaginative schemes that foster leadership development at any level of management, from governors to departments.
Our nomination recognises the support that the Staff Development Team gave during the Faculty reorganisation, which comprised leadership and management programmes and close support for the Faculty Team Managers, Directors of Administration, Deans and Associate Deans.
The programmes were co-designed and partly facilitated by Bath staff developers with external consultants and coaches, working with participants and managers to address needs as they emerged.
What makes this work award-worthy is that it didn’t provide an off-the-shelf management training course once the reorganisation had taken place, but sought to support people through significant change, even as they designed and put in place new teams and processes, developed their own new roles (which previously didn’t exist), and formed a community of leadership with a brief for greater collaboration and consistency. This was leadership and management development as an integral part of ambitious organisational development, still unusual in the sector and wholly innovative for Bath.
The impact of the programmes was particularly clear in the new Faculty administrative teams, as one Faculty Team Manager commented:
“As someone new to the University, this programme sent me a message that the University cared about the building of my team and of my development because a lot of time, effort and expertise was given by the Staff Development Manager and others in putting this together. It all knitted together very well with what was happening in our Faculty at the time and so it seemed a great a partnership”.
The Staff Development Unit has had a good year for external recognition:
- Dr Simon Inger, Head of Staff Development, won funding from the Leadership Foundation for Higher Education to research and develop ways of helping universities to become more adaptive and agile.
- A successful proposal to the Association of University Administrators by Angie Allcock resulted in funding to develop a new CPD framework for all administrative staff.
We are very pleased that the University has also been shortlisted in two other categories for the THE Awards: