Shifting gears: Empowering Elly to meet her policy challenge

Background

The organisation was implementing a change management plan that included a significant change to Elly’s role. She was now responsible for reviewing the organisation’s policy suite, and preparing advice for her manager as to which policies need to be updated, merged, or ceased and where there were policy gaps. She was also required to do all the necessary policy work including developing time-sensitive policy that met legislative requirements and that wouldn’t jeopardise the agency and or human rights of their clients. Elly knew how important this work was though she was anxious as this responsibility required not only someone with more policy experience and expertise than her, but it also required a policy team. Though for now it was just Elly, and the timeframes were tight.

Challenges Faced by Elly

1. The enormity of her role: Elly knew that she could not achieve everything that had landed on her desk, but she wanted to make sure that what she could do was done well.
   
   
2. Jeopardising service delivery: Elly was acutely aware and anxious as to how policies impact services to clients and impacts the staff who are delivering the services.
   
   
3. Not knowing what she doesn’t know: Elly was new to policy though keen to develop her career in policy. Though right now, this job required far more skills, experience, and expertise than what she had.
   
   
4. Identifying the must haves: Elly knew she needed to quickly enhance her policy skills though she couldn’t afford to develop skills that she couldn’t apply straight away.
   
   
5. Engaging people along the way: the essential part of policy work to engage stakeholders with everything else Elly had to do was overwhelming.
   
   
6. Governance, legislation, and compliance: the sector Elly worked in requires legislative and regulatory compliance that was a job in itself and contemplating getting her head around this in the required timeframes and reflecting it appropriately in policy was very scary.
   
   
7. Managing expectations: Elly was aware of the mounting pressures and tensions everyone was experiencing during the change, particularly her own supervisor. She was very worried that she would let down her supervisor and that that would reflect badly on them both.
   

1. One-on-one policy action learning: we supported Elly in regular meetings over a period of six months that also provided for additional meetings to work through urgent matters.
   
   
2. The policy action learning provided Elly:

• An approach to scope her role - what’s in and what’s out including identifying those policies that were ok, i.e., they didn’t need to be on Elly’s to-do list.
• An approach to map her work to ensure effectiveness and efficiency underpinned by principles including service delivery integrity.
• An understanding of the purpose of policy and the different types of policy.
• Foundational policy skills.
• A manageable approach to ensure genuine engagement with clients, staff and partners including how to enable the voice of children.
• An approach to map the policy suite to legislation and regulation to identify gaps and inconsistencies.
• An approach to ensure her supervisor who didn’t have a policy background, was kept abreast of progress, opportunities and challenges through timely briefings that presented information succinctly and as required, sought decisions to guide Elly’s work.
  

We worked with Elly to identify what good looks like for her and to develop quantitative and qualitative measures for:

• Having role clarity – what’s in and what’s out
• Being impactful
• Ability to navigate policy development
• Enhancing policy skills, capability, and confidence
• Positioning policy work to reflect the organisation’s strategic plan, goals, and values.