The Igloo board has been together for quite a while and had been through a tough time during Covid so we wanted to plan a new growth journey. We decided it was time to have a bit of a refresh, a reboot, and get some new ideas and plan different ways of thinking.
We agreed a fresh perspective would help us work out the questions we need to be asking ourselves to start that journey; what issues did we need to address and how to prioritise when there’s so much going on in the growing business. We wanted structure, clarity and actionable outcomes.
One of the challenges was to work on the people plan, how we identify gaps in the organisation. Taking a look, holistically, across the different functions then say, OK there’s some jobs that we absolutely agree that we’ve got a gap for and what kind of person would we be hiring for. We wanted to get some consensus on key hires and also which ones might actually save some management time, allowing us to focus more on our own jobs.
Liz facilitated personality profiling which identified where we had gaps and that’s helped us work out what kind of traits we might be missing. It’s helped us to conduct evidence-based decision-making. It also reminded us that people think differently and on occasions there is a need to adapt and adjust our communication style with each other.
It was also good to have Liz to facilitate the day so we could spend time together, talking through issues and really understanding a little bit about people’s communication styles. It might sound trivial, but Liz is great at capturing the action points during the board session and the value in this should not be overlooked. Liz’s detailed and impartial notes enables us to follow-up and hold each other to account.
When it comes to board facilitation, you need somebody independent who is not part of the group to challenge you and ask those questions. I’d say it’s definitely worth working with Growth Plans®.
