Policy professional development: Engaging and re-energising Selwyn’s policy team

Selwyn (name changed) leads a large government department team that has a mix of policy and operational staff whose focus is improving outcomes for families and their children. Selwyn is responsible for an extensive policy suite that includes strategic and operational policy, guidelines, and procedures. The department works within a complex legislative and regulatory environment.

Selwyn’s team has a mix of skills, experience, and expertise. Selwyn wanted to provide her staff with engaging and impactful policy professional development that would give her team a shared understanding of what policy is, a kitbag of tools and methods to ‘do policy’, and a re-energised appreciation of how their policy work can deliver exciting and important outcomes for families and their kids.

Identifying the challenges

1. Selwyn needed to ensure her team had a shared understanding of:

Critical thinking and analysis
Identifying policy purpose and scope – what’s in and what’s out
How to respond to their authorising environment’s needs, motivations, and concerns
How to respond to stakeholder, partner and user/client needs, motivations, and concerns
How to provide written and oral policy advice that ‘talks in the audience(s) language.

2. Selwyn also wanted to build individual and team confidence, flexibility, and adaptability to pivot to:

Changing needs and priorities
Across and between development, implementation, review, monitoring, and evaluation.

Our Solution

Clarifying the organisational context: an important first step was to build an understanding of the department’s bigger picture and then to understand how this impacted the work of Selwyn and her team.
Nutting out the challenges: discussions with Selwyn and two of her senior staff leading this project, helped clarify what was working well in the team and what wasn’t and removed any assumptions we had about what should be included in the professional development.
Developing a professional development experience: as we crafted the professional development workshop, we tested it with Selwyn and her two senior staff to make sure it was on point and to also build their ownership of what they wanted their staff to experience, learn and share.
Policy professional development delivery: we delivered a two-day interactive workshop with a day’s break in between.

Results and impacts

Staff regardless of whether they were senior or junior were able to explore and experience together policy in a safe and encouraging environment.
Staff worked with people they don’t normally work with extending their team’s networks.
The confidence of staff to do policy work increased noticeably and staff applied learnings immediately back at their desks.
Team managers gained enormous clarity about their roles and what was expected of them and how they needed to engage and support their staff.

Conclusion

By committing to her staff’s professional policy development, Selwyn created an opportunity for team learning and team building and achieved her goal to develop a shared understanding of what policy is and how to do it across her team. Over the two-day workshop, Selwyn’s staff had applied a range of policy tools and methodologies that they now apply in their work that has increased their policy effectiveness and efficiency.

Quote on policy professional development:

We engaged The Policy Room for tailored professional learning on the architecture for policy development within government for our team that has a diverse range of policy experience.

Salli used very relevant examples to extract and de-mystify process and strategy, while focussing on social value and the political context. Salli is an excellent facilitator and trainer and demonstrated her expertise in this field by demystifying policy while focussing on social value and the political context.

Everyone found it highly engaging, well-paced, well informed, and relevant to people’s respective roles.