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