Affinity Sutton Group is one of the largest housing association groups operating in England. Formed in October 2006 as a result of the merger between Affinity Homes Group and the William Sutton Group, Affinity Sutton owns and manages over 50,000 homes across the country.
Background
This period of growth and change, combined with the merger,has helped the group to maintain its edge in a competitive market. Development of its people had previously focused mainly on middle managers with emphasis on leadership skills. With the growing maturity of Affinity Sutton as a significant player in the housing association sector, the organisation recognised the need for its senior leaders to be performing at a higher strategic level. The aims of the new group are to maximise and develop synergies to deliver improvements in the quality, quantity, scope and efficiency of the services offered to customers.
“With any merger, differences in working practices, culture,values and organisational vision become immediately apparent,”
said Jonathan Cawthra, Group Resources Director for Affinity Sutton. “We needed to address these issues with our senior leaders to ensure that they were taking a consistent approach to the future development and growth of the group.”
Affinity Sutton began by taking an in-depth look at the organisation’s needs and discovered there was a perceived lack of proactive leadership. There was concern that a merged company might result in less autonomy and freedom for individual companies to provide the services they believed best met their individual customers. There was also some hesitancy about airing concerns about their organisation and laying bare differing vulnerabilities.
The analysis phase also identified a cultural issue in that some Affinity Sutton employees, from the various operating companies, might have felt unconnected, i.e. they belonged to disparate companies with different cultures, ways of working
and goals. The impact of this, together with operational demands meant there was a lack of urgency in making changes to existing practice and to developing a cohesive organisation with aligned vision and values across the group.
To successfully overcome these challenges, Roffey Park proposed a programme based upon organisational development and change with a central theme of growth, which would highlight the role their senior managers held in identifying opportunities and taking them forward with confidence.
Underpinning the programme was the formation of learning sets which focus on organisational projects so there is both
task and personal development within the process. Participants from across the different operating groups formed sets with the aim of sharing knowledge, experience and skills and, more simply, building effective relationships with each other. Each learning set was facilitated by a Roffey Park consultant, giving each participant the opportunity to focus on, and embed, their own learning. Participants were also supported and challenged by their colleagues in moving forward and take real actions in relation to their learning.
The Programme
The Strategy and Leadership Programme was designed to run over a period of 9 months and centred around three broad themes – leadership, strategy and change. To encourage participants to begin to see the benefits of working collectively, all modules used real organisational issues ensuring that the programme continued to meet Affinity Sutton’s needs. An important aspect of the overall programme was to develop a common purpose and move away from silo working in the separate operating companies.
The Change module presented frameworks and theories which participants could reflect on in the light of their own experience – particularly around managing differing stakeholders and the transitional aspects of change. “During this module, participants mapped the history of the various operating companies so they could see the value each of them brought to the new organisation. Many were surprised that there were aspects of the companies that they had previously been unaware of. It gave them a sense of the real benefit of working collectively and honoured the past of each of these organisations,” said Jonathan Cawthra.
The final module was a two day residential programme helping participants to develop a greater understanding of strategy and strategic thinking. On the second day, participants were joined by their senior executive team to develop a strategy for the merged organisation. Prior to this, participants agreed on specific strategic themes to discuss within their learning sets so they could develop ideas to present during the module. The exercise was structured using a methodology based on “world café” (Brown & Isaacs, 2005) and covered topics such as, what does the Group’s strapline “helping people put down roots” actually mean and what does operational autonomy within a group structure mean in reality.
“By doing this, Roffey Park encouraged Affinity Sutton to work more cohesively as a team and break down the barriers of
the ‘us and them’ thinking,” said Jonathan Cawthra. “It was important at this stage to encourage them to be more proactive – stepping up in terms of actively demonstrating their ability to be leaders in the organisation.”
The results
Since the Roffey Park programme, a ‘GET together’ group has been formed comprising Group Executive Team members and senior managers from the programme. This group of 37 meets four times a year around the planning cycle – to look back and review performance, launch the business planning phase, review corporate themes, start the budgeting process and set the direction for the following year.
Jonathan Cawthra concludes saying, “Affinity Sutton has been delighted with the results. We now have a team of senior managers who know they have a responsibility for influencing and shaping the future of their business and share with the executive team a vision and understanding of the future direction of the business. We saw immediate results toward the end of the programme - the Group Executive Team and senior managers were working effectively on their strategy with low key facilitation from the Roffey Park team. Our senior managers are now highly motivated to be involved in the future strategic direction of the Group. The team are clear about the culture they wanted develop within the organisation.”
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