EdenEvolve: Our leadership programme | Eden Futures

Our EdenEvolve leadership programme is only one week old and we couldn’t be more proud of the engagement and success of the programme so far!

EdenEvolve is our *NEW* module-based leadership programme for everyone with people management responsibilities at Eden Futures. It aims to boost our leaders’ confidence, skills, and knowledge in effectively leading their teams. We currently have 113 managers on the programme and so far, 35 managers have gone through the first learning module and successfully passed their knowledge check, which is amazing in 1 week!

Here, Alex Pugh our Head of HR, tells us more about the programme and her team of HR creatives that designed it and the exciting journey to Evolve:

“First things first: the geography of our company is huge! Where on earth do we start and how do we start?! As much as we value face-to-face learning and training, when we first started mapping out a leadership programme, we knew that we had a challenge in trying to do this in a meaningful way – especially as trying to get everyone together in a room for 16 modules just isn’t realistic.

The majority of our managers on the programme work within our Operations, ensuring the high quality care and support our service users deserve, managing within a national recruitment crisis, leading large teams and keeping staff engaged and motivated, juggling audits, inspections, supervisions, appraisals… and the ‘day-to-day’ which can throw several curve balls… And that’s not even all of it; the list goes on in our sector! We also know that personal and professional development is something our managers want – they’re eager for training and learning in ‘HR people essentials’, so we had to find something that would work for everyone – in a meaningful way.

As an HR team, we’ve all delivered training before and we could have easily pulled content together that would ‘do the job’ but who wants a tick box?! Our managers deserve more. They deserve learning experiences that are engaging, relevant, and genuinely supportive.

With Lynsey our creative PR and Marketing Manager, Lou Beardsley our HR Business Partner, and Meg Graham our ER Manager, we’ve tried to make this a learning adventure! As an HR and Marketing team, we want to be motivated, enthusiastic and enjoy this journey too! There’s certainly no fun in creating a bland Powerpoint that sticks to textbook-speak!

Each module is presented as a video, with the HR team providing voice overs (we’re trying to persuade our managers to lend their voices to later modules!), there’s ‘pause and reflect’ elements, supporting guidebooks and ‘top tips’ to make it as inclusive as possible and pitched at a level to suit everyone. Each module comes with a ‘Knowledge Check’ to support and evidence learning and a certificate to celebrate achievement.

We kicked off with a module that’s often the elephant in the room – ‘Courageous Conversations’ which are also known as ‘Managing Difficult Conversations in the workplace’. Why? Because dodging those tricky discussions doesn’t make them disappear (unfortunately). This module isn’t about doing them to perfection, though; it’s about being human. We focus heavily on the element of ‘being human’ throughout this module. The wellbeing of everyone at Eden Futures is important, so we talk about practicing self-care, how to check-in with our own emotions before, during and after those conversations, having empathy, as well as the key aspects of active listening, constructive feedback and achieving mutually beneficial outcomes. Our aims have been to support our managers to transform challenging dialogues into opportunities for growth and understanding.

We felt this was a good place to ‘set the tone’ for the rest of the modules and we’re proud of the feedback from our managers and to hear that they’re enjoying their learning. We’re excited to continue this momentum with upcoming modules on effective supervisions, appraisals, and performance management in the next couple of weeks.

This programme is a journey of learning, growing, and evolving together, as one team dedicated to excellence in every aspect of our work and a shared passion for making a difference in the lives we touch every day.”