This month, the Real Life Option blog comes from Tracy Logan, a member of the Good to Great Leadership Team and Support Worker (Glasgow)

When I first heard about the Good to Great programme with Real Life Options working in conjunction with Helen Sanderson Associates, I was very excited.  I believe that Real Life Options has always been a person centred organisation, with the service users we support at the centre of everything we do but anything that ensures this continues, and helps all staff develop their skills in person centeredness, has to be welcomed and encouraged.

I supported Sean, a service user to the Leadership Group, not knowing quite what to expect but enjoyed seeing people from all over the organisation coming together to speak and debate the various issues on how to ensure the programme moved forward.  I saw the group come together from all areas of the United Kingdom and work together for the benefit of the organisation and the people we support.  Listening to the views of others encouraged me to grow, share my thoughts, and to be more forward thinking. Hearing the success stories and how other parts of the organisation were doing was so encouraging and then to take that information back to my service and share with my colleagues, made them feel they were involved and realise that they could make a difference.  Good to Great just continues to grow and helps inform our discussions, and using the tools makes for better time management.

As I said, Real Life Options always has been a person centred organisation with regards to the people we support but being part of the Management training, looking at different areas and how person centred we are and could be, really energised me and heightened my motivation.  Anything that encourages person centred interactions between colleagues is something I firmly believe in.

I believe strongly in the fact that what makes Real Life Options a good organisation to work for, is there is very much an inclusive culture, which means we continue to employ the best support workers, which in turn will help enrich and increase service users independence and choice.  My motto is that not one person has all the answers but I'm sure that within each team employed by Real Life Options, there will be all the answers to any of the problems that may arise, if we just ensure that everyone has a chance to speak and is encouraged to do so.  The Good to Great programme has encouraged this and must continue to grow as people become more and more comfortable with the processes and tools.

I put myself forward to do the Accreditation training for Person Centred Thinking and was successful, which helped me achieve what is important to me, this being that I continue to learn, grow and develop within myself and my role.  I now deliver the two day Person Centred Thinking course every month and am able to speak with support workers from all over the division I work within, it is an amazing experience.  To hear how small things are being done to ensure that service users are having their wishes and desires met is fantastic. The staff tell me that being trained in how to use the tools to help with person centred practices will only enhance, this makes me feel like a part of an ongoing process to ensure that Real Life Options continues to grow and lead from the front in social care.

This month's blog is by Suzanne Hala, Marketing and Communications Manager for Real Life Options and member of the Good to Great Leadership Team.

As Marketing and Communications Manager for Real Life Options, I felt my natural role in the Good to Great Leadership team was to share progress and news, to the rest of the organisation. With 1,800 staff spread across England and Scotland, this can produce its own unique challenges!

Our main tool for internal communication is realnews, a bi-monthly magazine that is read by staff members, people we support and their families and commissioners. It's a great medium to channel good news and success stories from around the organisation.

My favourite tales have to be where taking a person centred approach has made a huge difference in the lives of the people we support. For example, I heard lately about a person who took their one page profile in to hospital when undergoing an operation. The staff at the hospital learnt so much about the patient within a few minutes which helped the process and put the patient at ease.

I also enjoy sharing stories about people taking person centred practices outside of the organisation. A lady who works as a support worker for Real Life Options took the positive and productive meeting format into her church meetings. She now says that they are more efficient, interesting and yield more results.

As a marketing department, we also produce posters on a monthly basis concentrating on a particular tool. These posters go up in services and offices. They are a point of reference and can refresh memories from the tools explained on the person centred thinking course.

The latest development is the creation of a website where our progress as a leadership team can be mapped. There are photos, blogs, calendar of events and a library of resources. It's in it's infancy but is a timeless way to record our journey and make our progress accessible to all.

I have to say, Good to Great has grown organically as much as it has through communication work. Changing the way that we do things is not always easy but has been adopted in quite a natural way as once tried, the tools speak for themselves in producing benefits not only for the people we support but in the way staff members and teams interact with each other.

This month, the Real Life Option blog comes from Sean. Sean is a person we support and is a member of the Good 2 Great leadership team. Here, he talks about what Good 2 Great means to him.

Sean Bryson:

"Good 2 Great means a lot to me, because it will move Real life Options forward and myself with it. Allowing me to eventually pick my own staff team and have the choices I want, this is similar to what I have now with Real Life Options supporting me, but more choice is a good thing and planning with me using the tools I learned at the 2 days Person Centred Thinking is a great thing.

I like all the different tools used within the programme and feel they will ensure that all staff are using Person Centred Thinking to ensure all service users get the support they want.  The 'one page profile' is my favourite and this allows staff to see how best to support me in the way that I want. It also allows me to see what is important to my staff team which I think is a step forward as they can begin to understand what its like to have information about them out there, like all service users have.

I love being part of the Good 2 Great leadership team and going down to Pontefract and to play my part and be the voice for other service users within Real Life Options. I have enjoyed the experience of being part of the excitement that has come from Good 2 Great. I have enjoyed making new friends such as Ruthie and the others on the team.  Good 2 Great is not just the future for Real Life Options but it is my future too."

This month, the Real Life Option blog comes from Albert Adomakoh, a Service Manager from London.

Albert Adomakoh:

I believe that every organisation, like any other living organism, has an ethos that guides decision making and directs what we do. I joined RLO a few years ago and it was apparent that the people we support were at the centre of what we do.

When I heard of the G2G programme, I was quite excited, as I realised the potential it had to positively impact the organisation to achieve greatness in what we do and more importantly, the added benefits of training individuals to utilise the tools needed to achieve this.

Internal investment to ensure the future is fundamental and valuable to any organisation. Some may question this, especially in the current  economic downturn, but I believe that it is an indication of good leadership and planning to invest in the future. Although it is difficult a time for everyone, the changes we are going through present opportunities, both within and outside the organisation.

I admire Maya Angelou's quote on change:

 'The need for change bulldozed a road down the centre of my mind'.  

As much as I am affected by organisational change, I count it a privilege to be a part of the leadership programme and also to participate in the training to use these tools.

The services I work in have greatly benefited from: 

• the use of one page profiles
• clarifying any ambiguities around our roles and responsibilities with the use of the doughnut tool
• effective organising and holding meetings with the positive and productive meeting approach
• reviewing aspects of our service provision with tools like 'what's working and what's not working'
• measuring the quality of our service provision as a whole.

I believe that the G2G programme as a whole and our partnership with Helen Sanderson Associates will positively influence what we do - and no doubt move us on to greater heights.

                                     http://www.reallifeoptions.org/

This month, Paul Spooner, Management Accountant for Real Life Options and member of the Good to Great Leadership Team talks us through his experience of Good to Great and the changes he has seen around the organisation.

Paul Spooner:

Having worked for Real Life Options for 7 years, it's clear to me that Good to Great has already and will continue to have a massive impact on our organisation.

As soon as I received the initial training on Person-Centred Thinking, I realised that there was a massive opportunity for us to transform not only the way in which we relate to the people we support (which has to remain our primary focus), but also the way in which we do business with each other internally, and with our partners in the wider social care community.

Some months into our programme, I'm as excited by it now as I was on that first day, and that excitement is sustained and enhanced by the changes I see daily in both individuals, and the organisation as a whole. It's really satisfying to see that the messages from Good to Great have taken on a life of their own and are trickling through the organisation much more quickly than we could have anticipated. I guess it demonstrates that people are genuinely behind our aim to become a truly person centred organisation.

I'm privileged to be a member of the Good to Great Leadership Team for RLO, which is helping to shape the direction of the G2G transformation within the organisation. This group is made up of a cross-section of people from all over the organisation and at all levels, including people we support. The great thing about this group is that it reflects to a large degree the way we already work in RLO - everyone's view has equal merit, regardless of status, and everyone has a voice that will be heard respectfully. We don't always agree on everything, but the level of enthusiasm from everyone in the group tends to get us through! I always find that attending this group re-energises me to go back out and champion the Good to Great message as best I can.

At this early stage in the programme, we are placing a lot of emphasis on the One Page Profile; it's a great starting point for everyone involved in Real Life Options from service users, to staff, to families and commissioners to get a real understanding of person centred thinking through beginning with themselves.

I've found that I've become much more aware of myself, my drivers and triggers, by going through the process of putting my profile together, and through reading my colleagues profiles, I've become (I hope!) more sensitive to their support needs. This can only bring positive results, helping us to work together better! I'm trying to encourage people to share their profiles with each other as often as possible for this reason.

I've also realised that the profile is a living document - it changes over time, and it can change in relation to specific activities or situations - I fully expect to have several different versions for different situations - as an example, I just did one purely in relation to me and coffee (with which I have a complicated and slightly obsessive relationship!), so that I can have conversations with people about the different aspects of their personalities and daily lives they might want to capture in a profile (or series of profiles), to help their colleagues understand them a little better.

As a numbers man, I'm keen to keep track of our progress, and we recently carried out a survey to benchmark our progress with One-Page Profiles across the organisation, so that we can measure again in a few months time, and then celebrate how far we've travelled in that time.

I'm based in our Head Office, and have had the opportunity to speak to the rest of the Head Office Staff about Good to Great through our Head Office meeting. We recently used the Doughnut to look at each department and then to identify any gaps or overlaps as a team. From that perspective the programme has enabled us to become more efficient as Head Office. The genius of the doughnut is its simplicity. It's an easy tool to complete, yet the depth of information that can be derived from it can have ground-breaking effects. I also believe that it's a fantastic tool for eliminating misunderstandings and tensions between one group of colleagues and another, about what a team's role is. What my team thinks your team should be doing may be radically different from what your team thinks it should be doing! - So let's clear that up as soon as we can! I'm trying wherever possible, through talking to people up and down the organisation, to encourage teams to share their doughnuts with each other.

I have dedicated a space in my office for Good to Great. It includes my One Page Profile, those of colleagues, information about my team and associated posters and communication. It's a good way to capture the imagination of colleagues, and is a great talking point (especially with the bowl of sweets and comfortable chairs strategically placed in that area!)

http://www.reallifeoptions.org

As an organisation, we are delighted to have been invited to blog on the Helen Sanderson website. Our journey began from a niggle that although we're working hard and making a real difference in the lives of people we support, we could be better and we could achieve more. Each blog will be written by different people from our organisation describing how Good to Great has touched their lives and what it means to them.

Today, Lisa Watchorn (Operations Director) and Brian Hutchinson (Chief Executive) share their experience of the start of our journey from Good to Great.

Lisa Watchorn: 

As the new Director of Operations, I am thrilled to be introducing Good to Great to Real Life Options. Having worked with Helen Sanderson Associates in previous roles, I quickly identified that Real Life Options, as a person centred organisation was a perfect match for the Good to Great programme. We aren't looking to change what we do; we are looking to make that one degree shift from being a good organisation, to a great organisation. The programme has also created opportunities to enter into dialogue and build upon committed partnerships with commissioners and like-minded organisations.

We are and continue to be an organisation which breeds individual creative support. The Good to Great tools create arenas for honest and open conversation and an environment where it is 'ok' to challenge each other. Good to Great also allows us to handle and evaluate our meetings in a consistent way. The tools are making big differences- in little ways.

The best thing about good to great is the organic way it has spread through the organisation from it's beginnings as a days training session with the Good to Great leadership team (a team of colleagues and people we support from around the organisation). Conveying a new message and new way of working to 1,700 colleagues, people we support, and their families across England and Scotland is no easy task!

Our leadership meetings are enthusiastic and interactive, they are made of senior management, support workers, and people that we support ensuring that the message that is taken out to the organisation worked for everyone. The people we support are growing in confidence and telling us how to get it right! For example, Sean Bryson, a person we support uses the Service User Forum to gather opinion and share information from the Leadership Team Meetings.

Like any good organisation, we try to put the people we support at the heart of everything we do. I am privileged to be working with Helen Sanderson Associates as partners and am excited to be part of our journey from Good to Great.

Brian Hutchinson:

Maybe I always would say this but to me it feels like "great to greater!". I think our services and staff are fantastic as it is but the chance and the tools to improve are clearly available to us within the partnership with Helen Sanderson Associates. The next two years hold some of the biggest challenges and biggest opportunities that we have ever faced. I think that we will transform the way that support is offered and truly enable the people we support to take Real control of their lives. I hope that everyone joins in and enjoys the next steps in Real Life Options development. It's going to be great!

                              http://www.reallifeoptions.org