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Recent Projects
Kings College Students Union
Over an 18 month period Ruth helped King’s College London Students’ Union in the following ways:
- Ruth helped us accelerate and develop our trustee training programme; she facilitated workshops, challenged our trustees, and built up their skills and knowledge in terms of their governance role; from a point two years ago when we first recruited a board of trustees we won the Third Sector Award for Most Improved Governance and now have a dynamic, balanced and passionate team of trustees.
- As my mentor Ruth has helped me really build on my skills and experience in my first role as a CEO; Ruth challenges, encourages and helps me reflect on how I am performing and how our organisation as a whole is developing; she has the knack of asking the right questions at the right time.
- Our senior management team has also benefited from Ruth and Fiona’s experience having developed both a six month programme of coaching and through facilitated workshops. Through the work they have undertaken, the team have gelled, explored how they work together and how they work with me; the results have been amazing, a highly performing senior management team that allows me to work much more closely with the board and our stakeholders.
Ruth is extremely capable, incredibly personable, and conscientious, energetic and enthusiastic in all that she does. I believe that Ruth has all the attributes to make a very valuable contribution to any organisation. I am sure trustee and senior management teams would benefit tremendously from her insight, energy and experience.
Steve Vaid, Chief Executive, KCSU
Barnet Citizens Advice Bureau - Preparing for Commissioning and Board Development
Barnet Citizens Advice Bureau (BCAB) has served local people in Barnet for 70 years. It has two main aims: to provide the advice people need for the problems they face and to improve the policies and practices that affect people’s lives.
The Issue
BCAB had never bid for a tender before. It also had a relatively new board of trustees. So when the local authority announced it was going to commission advice services in the borough, preparing for commissioning seemed an obvious opportunity to review the workings of the board and improve our governance.
The Solution
We arranged an away day for all trustees and members of the Senior Management Team (SMT). My mentor, Ruth was asked to facilitate the event.
The purpose of the event was to help us formulate an approach to the impending commissioning of advice services; also to help our new trustees better understand their governance role within BCAB.
The Chair, Vice Chair and CEO worked with Ruth to devise a programme w ith these aims in mind. The first session focused on BCAB’s mission, interrogating its potential role in the 21st Century (and with the country in the grip of a recession). Working on the organisation’s mission enabled trustees and SMT to debate at a very strategic level the overall purpose of the organisation, and to develop an understanding of context in which the work on commissioning could take place.
The next session on the nature of the commissioning process helped trustees to understand the implications for BCAB specifically.
Group feedback was then debated, and Ruth deftly drew out the key messages both from the exercise and from the day as a whole.
Next Steps
A working group was set up to produce a commissioning action plan. The plan sets out in detail the next steps the organisation must take on the road towards being commissioned, and is clear about who must take each action.The ongoing work of the group will be reported at each board meeting until the bid is submitted, at which point the work of the group will be over.
Conclusion
Although this work on governance had been undertaken in the context of developing an organisational approach to commissioning, the lessons learned on the role of the board were applicable far more generally to the work of the organisation as a whole. Much of the debate centred on the delegation of tasks from the Board to the SMT and the need for clarification on the overall role of the board in the process. The event gave us a shared commitment and a spring board for further practical governance development work. Having Ruth to facilitate the trustee/smt event was really productive in helping us think and practice working together . It helped set a way of working that we were able to take into our subsequent work.
Tim Clark – Chief Executive, Barnet Citizens Advice Bureau |
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