Under the guidance of its late principal Bill Cropper, The Change Forum provided strategic consulting, facilitation and coaching services over several decades to support organisations in revitalising culture, enriching workplace wellbeing and building leadership capability to develop more resilient, adaptable workplaces with robust, cohesive, high-performing teams.
Bill’s long history of translating complex concepts into down-to-earth practical applications with workble processes and easy-to-apply tools has provided a pool of quality resources we can continue to share to support teams and leaders through change.
Working Better Together is fundamentally the goal… While our tailored in-house programs and regional coaching clinics have come to a close, our extensive library of well-regarded, comprehensive toolkits provide a pool of quality learning resources we can continue to share with those seeking to improve their leadership and teamworking capabilities around change, culture, conversations, cohesion, wellbeing, coaching, mentoring and facilitation.
The focus of our programs fit into 5 broad themes covering essential leadership, teamworking and culture change capabilities today’s leaders need to support vibrant, healthy work cultures and high-performing teams…
Emotional self-management, self-awareness and mindful action are essential capabilities for building healthy workplaces that support individual wellbeing and promote resilient, cohesive teams. We provide a range of Emotional Intelligence, Mindfulness and Wellbeing programs for leaders, staff and teams, including: Leading with Emotional Intelligence, EI at Work (for staff), Teaching with EI, Social Intelligence in Teams, Mindful Leadership in Action, Mindfulness at Work (for staff), Trauma 1st-Aid self-help clinics and Building Resilience at Work.
Understanding how the way we communicate impacts everything we do at work, becoming more conversationally-aware and mastering tools to improve the conversations you have in a variety of contexts is a key skill for great leadership and high-functioning teams. Our long-running Dealing with Difficult Discussions program has long been regarded a valuable asset for leaders at all levels, along with our general Constructive Conversations program and more targetted topics: Positive Performance Conversations (both leader and staff versions), Defusing Difficult Encounters, Persuasive Conversations, and Building Conversational Confidence.
Constructive, flexible work cultures are vital for motivating high performance, commitment and productivity while encouraging cohesion, resilience and adaptability. Derived from years of supporting organisations and teams through change and culture revitalisation, we provide programs that support leaders in: Learning to Lead Change, Creating Constructive Cultures, Preparing People for Change, Developing Shared Visions, Leading Learning Schools and Building Change Resilience at Work.
With a background of over 30 years consulting around team formation and development, our Working Better Together framework provides a flexible series of modules that can be combined in different ways to target specific improvement areas or a range of topics that suit particular team needs. Stand-alone programs include Building Better Teams, Working as One Team, Building Respectful Workplaces and Socially Intelligent Teams. In the past, we offered in-house Leadership Team Action Learning programs for senior and executive teams that combined team learning sessions with individual leadership coaching.
Leaders exert a profound impact on the performance, culture, values and emotional climate of the people around them. Building leadership capacity at all levels is a central concern for forward-thinking organisations – who understand that today’s leaders need to expand their traditional ‘positional’ roles to become networkers, mobilisers, facilitators, coaches, values-stewards and engagers – leveraging learning to challenge prevailing mental models, mobilise coalitions, develop shared solutions and visions and create a supportive environment which unleashes innovation and learning potential in others. In addition to personal mastery and wellbeing programs, our Learning to Lead series includes Launching Future Leaders, Leadership Action Learning, Essentials of Facilitation, Facilitating Effective Teams, Learning to be a Coaching Leader and Mentoring for Managers.
Our programs and processes relate to real Australian workplaces, and employ action-learning principles that target real leadership, teamworking and service delivery challenges back-at-work.
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Leaders act as emotional caretakers for their team’s wellbeing. Having capacity to role-model resilience is vital Faced with setbacks and adversity, teams look to their leader to stay buoyant, resist stress and demonstrate emotional balance, tenacity, perseverance and resolve – and to support their team to do the same
When leaders act authentically, practise what they profess and do what they say they’ll do, we’re more likely to trust, respect and want to connect with them. Authentic leaders don’t mask their true selves, they’re open, honest and genuine, act with integrity, live their values and speak their truth.
Great leaders act like cultural umbrellas. They shelter teams from adverse influences, keeping them protected, supported, safe and behaviourally sound and secure. Under their umbrella, people know their purpose and can perform at their peak. Optimally, a leader’s cultural umbrella keeps people united beneath common cultural beliefs, ground-rules, rituals and values that guide how they behave and perform. Without that kind of shielding and protection, cultures can quickly stray off-course…
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High Tension Encounters (HTEs) happen regularly in any workplace – offices, schools, hospitals, councils, work-sites, factories…
The negative impact of poorly-handled HTEs on colleagues, customers, patients and work-teams is well-attested. Whether it’s toxic personalities, inveterate arguers, belligerent bosses or conflict-ridden contrarians, HTE’s distract from productive work focus, detract from good results, debilitate teams, distress and unsettle us, and create caustic cultures in the long term…
The customary line is that conflict is beneficial – it clarifies, corrects, changes and leads to better solutions and decisions.
Yet another line of thought suggests something quite different: that it has prolonged negative consequences that undermine relationships, trust and collaboration as well as distracting from task-focus and wasting resources in prolonged conflict mediation processes that largely don’t work.…
So, whether or not it is sporadically constructive, in many instances conflict it seems is damaging, harmful and linked to high stress and staff turnover.
Building conversational capability to better deal with difficult HTEs may not reduce their frequency but it can help us to handle them better, have more constructive confrontations and mitigate some of the negative consequences that follow on the heels of unregulated conflict.
© Bill Cropper – The Change Forum 2023
