Helping Macmillan teams thrive together

The challenge

The North of England Partnerships and Engagement team is made up of four different teams. Collectively they include more than 20 people who work across two large geographical regions. The organisation had re-evaluated their way of working and organising themselves. As a team, they were in the early stages of deliberating how they could do more of their best work together.

They needed to create space and time to plan how they could work more collaboratively, strategically and aligned as one North of England team. They also wanted to celebrate the great strengths across the team, understand opportunities for growth and connect their work to a compelling and shared purpose.

Our approach

We started by asking questions, actively listening and seeking to understand the experience of the people we were working with.

A survey enabled us to hear from every person in the team, we also spoke one-on-one with members from each team, across both geographies and with different levels of responsibility.

Using this insight, we worked with the team to design an agenda and to identify the team’s own development priorities for the weeks and months ahead.

We used Marshall Ganz’s public narrative approach to allow the team to share ‘stories of me’, ‘stories of we’ and ‘stories of now’. This helped people to acknowledge, understand and validate the range of experiences across the team. Then the group moved into a process of describing the potential of these individual stories combined in a ‘we’.

Conversations on their purpose-driven strategy allowed the team to collectively identify five key areas in which they wanted to take action together:

• describing ‘we’
• learning together
• connecting together
• building openness
• planning and prioritising.

Finally, we ensured that the team kept themselves honest to this work, agreeing what needed to be done in the here and now.

Outcome

By the end of the project the team had drafted a purpose-driven strategy, and co-designed a development plan for what they wanted to act on now, and hoped to achieve in the longer term.

The ‘small but mighty’ team described the project as thought provoking, challenging and supportive, all conditions that help people come together to make a real difference.

Kaleidoscope provided an amazing opportunity to bring together a new, and geographically-wide, team at a critical time. We were able to shape how we could work best and have the greatest impact for people living with cancer. It gave us the platform, energy and momentum to build great foundations for our collective efforts, and we have taken that forward as the team has grown in size and ambition.

Heather McLean, Head of Partnerships for Macmillan Cancer Support North of England