Living My Way's journey to becoming a high-performing team

Background

Living My Way (formerly Allowance Inc) was established in 1992 with the purpose of supporting and empowering people with disabilities to take control of their lives. The organisation was formed after a successful pilot program with the Commonwealth Government in the late 1980s that allowed people with a disability to have control over the supports they required so that they could live as independently as they wanted.

Fast forward to 2016 and the launch of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and a transition to a whole new way of working. Today Living My Way is an organisation with a multi-million-dollar turnover committed to self-directed living for people with disabilities.

Our journey together

Philip Anderson, CEO, recognised that as Living My Way developed, the leadership team would also need to evolve into a more cohesive, higher performing team as it provided direction to the business.  Philip approached Leadership Space through mutual connections and invited us to work with Living My Way’s leadership team to take the business to the next level and embed a positive culture across the organisation.

We collaborated with the leadership team through both individual coaching and team sessions to:

• Build self-awareness of the team members about their own individual strengths and communication styles, and how best to collaborate as a team given that most were working remotely (due to COVID19), which led to feelings of lost connection and uncertainty – we did this by leveraging the Lumina Spark tool that identifies every day, latent and pressurised behaviours that could impact effective professional relationships
• Support the team to clarify the team purpose, focus and behaviours they wanted to role model
• Recognise the significant pressure and workload that each employee of the organisation was under, especially in the COVID19 induced environment, and worked through ways of supporting them to prioritise and build trust with each other through these intense times
• Focus in on key value-adding areas, for example the team created a decision-making framework that helped them make more inclusive and considered decisions. This demonstrated a break-through in the team’s development, as it not only recognised an issue that needed addressing, but a concerted effort by all involved to develop, implement and embed a targeted process into the team’s way of working together.