In 2011, East Thames Group was facing a difficult organisational challenge. The housing association needed to reduce costs and improve performance while preserving the care, quality and commitment to customers that sat at the heart of its identity. Its Board and Executive recognised that changes to systems and structures alone would not be enough. Leadership and culture had to move with them.
Rather than treating organisational transformation and leadership development as separate activities, East Thames brought them together. MJA worked with the CEO and HR Director to create a development process for the organisation’s 40 senior managers, built around a live enterprise question:
How do we create a culture that achieves the right balance between customer service and commercial performance?
That question became the work of the programme. Senior leaders investigated their own organisation through interviews and focus groups, examined the assumptions and unwritten rules shaping the culture, received 360° feedback and coaching, and looked outside East Thames for different ways of working — including visits to organisations such as John Lewis Partnership, Barclaycard and Laing O’Rourke.
What they found went well beyond individual leadership capability. Decision-making was being pulled upwards. People did not always feel trusted or empowered. Organisational silos made collaboration difficult. A strong ethic of care and customer service was sometimes in tension with the emerging need for greater commercial discipline, prioritisation and performance. The development process gave senior leaders a space to step out of the organisational ‘white water’, make sense of those patterns together and decide where they could intervene.
Learning then moved back into the organisation. Participants ran practical experiments in East Thames’ ‘social architecture’: exploring more democratic employee involvement, simplifying Board reporting and examining the systems and behaviours shaping customer experience. The programme evolved as the organisation evolved rather than following a fixed curriculum. Coaching, peer learning, masterclasses and reflection were brought in when they could help leaders make progress on the work in front of them.
The impact was broader than a conventional leadership programme. Evaluation pointed particularly to greater leadership self-awareness, stronger networks across organisational boundaries, behavioural development and a better understanding of the wider organisation. More importantly, the work helped shift the conversation from leadership as something exercised by a few people at the top towards a more collective responsibility for changing East Thames.
East Thames became an early demonstration of what happens when leadership development and organisation change are designed as one process. The programme created value because leaders were not learning about transformation at a distance: they were examining their own system, experimenting inside it and taking shared responsibility for changing it.