Building personal effectiveness at
hft

hft is a national charity which helps people with learning disabilities and their families to live the life they want to live. hft provides innovative, ground-breaking services to the people they support, and has an excellent reputation as a high-quality service provider.

hft is committed to enabling its employees to reach their full potential and invests highly in the development and skill of its people at all levels, through a comprehensive programme of in-house and external training.

The challenge

After a comprehensive review of their training provision, hft identified the need for its managers to build their personal effectiveness.

In particular hft identified the need for two key areas of learning:

1. Everyday personal effectiveness: Including communicating assertively, effective written and verbal communication and, working with non-verbal communication
2. Personal effectiveness in formal situations: To include making meetings effective, creating rapport and presenting with confidence, negotiation skills, achieving outcomes, and ensuring actions are carried out.

hft consulted with Saltbox Training and Events who provide training and development services which increase people’s skills, knowledge, confidence, motivation, morale, and wellbeing. Founder director Nicki Davey, who is a Master TetraMap Facilitator, developed and delivered a two-day course.

The solution

Nicki developed a highly participative, engaging two-day Personal Effectiveness Training programme which met all the objectives outlined by hft. The programme used TetraMap® to underpin the learning which helped participants to become more effective, professional and influential in the workplace.

Day one of the programme focused on self-awareness and self-management. Saltbox used the TetraMap® profiling tool to examine learners’ own communication and behavioural preferences and to identify how these impact on others. Learners then develop strategies to help them to take responsibility and control of their own behaviour, and to develop a positive outlook and greater resilience during difficult times.

Day two of the programme focused on working effectively with others: this gave learners the awareness, understanding and skills to build successful relationships and achieve success through working effectively with others. They learnt essential skills for persuading, influencing, and negotiating to achieve the desired results and the understanding developed through using TetraMap® enabled them to put these into practice successfully.

The two modules together helped learners to understand the relationship between their own attitudes, beliefs and behaviours, how they impact on others, and how it determines their own effectiveness, with TetraMap® providing the foundation for this.

The result

This highly participative programme enabled learners to learn new models, ideas, and theories as well as having ample opportunity to practise new techniques and approaches and receive constructive feedback in the safety of the training room.

This made it easy for learners to transfer their learning back into the workplace and has resulted in significant direct changes in behaviour. The key changes observed among learners are:

• They are more assertive when dealing with the staff they manage, their own line managers, and representatives of external agencies
• They are managing time and prioritising workloads more effectively
• They look after themselves better so that they are more resilient and better able to deal with stress
• They are developing a positive mental attitude and managing their own responses to difficult situations by reframing them
• They deal with conflict and difficult people constructively and confidently