Public Sector Leadership Development Program

Creating and facilitating a tailored leadership development program for leaders within the public sector

Summary/overview

This agency wished to upskill senior leaders within a specific technical area across the public sector, particularly with skills around leading people and leading through change. We worked with them to create and deliver a bespoke leadership development program aligned with their leadership expectations and competencies.

Situation & Challenges

The client for this project was a large public sector organisation, who had an accountability to develop a cohort of senior (C-Suite level) leaders within a specific technical space across the public sector. This was due to ongoing challenges with the capabilities of these leaders, as well as the changing demands and requirements put on these leaders across the WA public sector. Being in the public sector created unique challenges for this particular group of leaders, who had high levels of responsibility around reporting and standards, but with less decision-making capability and freedom to do things as they see fit.

The client had a defined set of development areas and leadership capabilities that they wanted to develop within their leaders and a desire to develop these areas through a leadership development program. They had already done significant work in scoping out the development requirements of the leadership cohort, and had clear learning objectives and outcomes that they desired to achieve.

The client approached People Solutions to develop two modules of a bespoke leadership development course that covered key content including leadership of self and others, as well as leading through change. People Solutions proposed an approach to the development and delivery of this content given our specialty in leadership development.

One of the main challenges in this process was to develop highly customised leadership development content tailored to their specific leadership capability framework. The program also needed to address a broad range of leadership capabilities while adhering to a strict delivery timeline. Compounding this challenge was the seniority of the leadership cohort, which required a strategic approach to secure their buy-in and sustained commitment throughout the program.

Our Solution

People Solutions proposed a complete leadership development course for this project. First, we developed more comprehensive day plans, along with detailed content overviews that described how each of the learning objectives would be achieved. We then met with the client to create greater alignment between our best practice objectives and their own knowledge of public leadership accountabilities.

We then built out full leadership development courses, that included 3 and half days of delivery via both face-to-face and virtual settings, along with accompanying workbooks, workshop activities, assessments, and leadership impact reports. These materials covered topics such as emotional intelligent in leadership, stress and physiological responses, leadership style and brand, adaptive leadership, and management of change.

People Solutions then facilitated these leadership development workshop days along with the administration of leadership personality assessments, to several cohorts. Given the density of materials and the need for leaders to apply concepts in their roles, content was delivered over several months.

We also created facilitator guides and supporting materials to accompany the workshops, so that the client could run the training themselves in future. After each session, we considered feedback, what worked, what didn’t, and made small adjustments to the content and delivery to continuously improve them.

Result

The public sector agency has committed to ongoing partnership with People Solutions on this program, with a commitment to continue running the course through to 2026. The intention at this stage is to have a total of 120 senior leaders complete this leadership development program.

Feedback to date from participating leaders has been overwhelmingly positive. With the content of the workshop being recommended as engaging and useful