Six CI Coaches

When our remit expanded back in June 2020 to include the whole of the University we soon realised that we needed to rethink our approach to building continuous improvement capability at the University of Leeds.

We are a small team and we really didn’t want to be creating an army of people to be deployed to help teams with their Continuous Improvement challenges. We wanted to help teams build the capability themselves.

That’s what CI is all about after all!

We’d previously run a programme which developed a team of Lean practitioners who could work on CI projects. Their focus was to work on time-bound projects, helping teams to work through more complex process issues.

We realised that the Lean practitioner approach alone was not going to help us achieve our aim of building capability. We decided to develop our approach so that we could target small teams, training them as a whole team on the basics of continuous improvement and supporting them in integrating CI into their everyday work.

We still had the problem of capacity and how many teams we could realistically work with over a 12 month period as well as support projects which would need our or our Lean practitioner’s level of expertise.

This is where a new role emerged….

Tadaaaaah! The CI coach

The role of the CI coach would be to deliver our introduction to CI training to teams and coach them through this training. This would mean that the CI team were no longer the bottle-neck and we could reach more teams in a shorter period of time. They would be our enablers who could bring teams together to collaborate on every day problems.

We designed a special development programme for our CI coaches and coupled this with action learning to enable them to support each other's development.  The experience of going through the training together is really unifying.  We have seen this with the Lean Practitioners.  The added benefit is that learning and sharing is enabled across the institution.

So what will our coaches do?

Well once they have finished their training they will be able to support teams by:

• Facilitating learning sessions with participants who have undertaken online training modules.  These could be teams or groups of individuals in peer learning sessions.
• Providing coaching and support on request to help embed the application of the learning in the workplace.
• Assisting with gathering benefits, identification of project opportunities, encouraging contacts to follow the CI governance approach.

Who are they?

Antony Butcher, Student Education Service; Imogen Gerard, Student Education Service; Steve Sloan, Security Services; Aysha Baig, Digital Education Service and Student Education;  Liz Simpson, Student Education Service; and Niamh Tooher, Quality and Assurance Team.

How do you become a coach?

It would be fair to say it’s quite a commitment and not just in terms of your time but ours. You need to be determined and want to make a difference.

CI is generally fun. I love my job as I get to be innovative and playful whilst working with a range of teams across the organisations. How brilliant is that? But it can also be tough. A large portion of the role is tackling culture change, and that’s not always easy when you are wanting to work with people who are running around trying to keep the lights on. Often, we find that the last thing they feel they need is the CI team knocking on the door asking if they want to come out and play.

Because of this we literally hand-pick our CI coaches. They are identified either through working with us on projects, through engaging on the network and generally being super eager to learn more and help with our CI mission.

But it’s not just about attending seminars, it’s also about what you have done with that knowledge. Each of our CI coaches have demonstrated an aptitude for CI in the way that they engage. They have taken the knowledge they have learned and have applied it in their workplace.

But they haven’t stopped there. They have then brought back what they have learned to the CI network and have helped us influence others by offering cases studies and asking us to work with their teams.

The type of person we are looking for in a coach is someone who:

• Has an interest in CI
• Has an interest in the development of others
• Is interested in organisational development and wants to make a difference
• Enjoys presenting and leading discussions
• Has an enthusiastic ’can do’ attitude to work
• Likes interacting with others
• Is comfortable using technology for meetings and workshops

They also need to have support from their managers not just in terms of releasing them to undertake the training but also in terms of wanting to build a CI culture within their service. It’s important you have that support not just from our CI community but also back at base within your service. We need you to succeed in this role.

Are you ready for a challenge?

We are currently in the middle of delivering training to our first cohort of coaches.  The training runs over 7 months and focuses on facilitation, coaching, influencing as well as the basics of continuous improvement. Our intention is to train two cohorts of 6 coaches each year, March and September.

We are intending to start our second round of training from March 2022 and our second cohort is already starting to firm up.

If you think this might be something you want to explore then have a chat with us or one of our CI coaches to find out more.