The City of Casey is a local government area in Victoria, Australia in the outer south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. Casey is Victoria's most populous municipality, with a population around 350,000.

Like most organisations, the City of Casey faces many challenges that impact performance.  Some of these include:

• Funding for a fast-growing and evolving municipality
• Controlling expenditure and achieving a surplus in a rate cap constrained environment.
• Supply chain issues leading to increased cost of materials and workforce shortages.
• Increasing the efficiency of operations to maximise productivity while meeting key community service expectations.

To achieve its organisational goals, the City of Casey recognised the need to cultivate high-performing leaders and cohesive teams across all departments. Initially, several teams had engaged external consultants who introduced the Team Management Profile (TMP) as a strategic tool for addressing common challenges. Through the TMP, team members developed greater self-awareness, gained insight into their colleagues' perspectives, and identified skill gaps that were barriers to effective collaboration. Encouraged by the positive, transformative results within these early adopters, the City of Casey committed to scaling these high-performance practices across the entire organisation, aiming to foster a culture of continuous improvement and teamwork.

APPROACH

The City of Casey began by accrediting five internal facilitators to conduct TMP debriefs, laying the groundwork for a broader, scalable delivery. They also integrated the TMP into their Elevate #Leaders program.  This is an a la carte leadership development program where leaders select courses that include Building Trust, Growth Mindset, Communication, Coaching and others.  As TMP Accredited Practitioners, the facilitators make key links within the unique programs they run – connecting work preferences and ways of working to various leadership concepts.

Participation in the TMP was offered on an opt-in basis, allowing departments and teams to choose when and how to engage. Several departments led by example, ensuring their entire teams completed the profile. To date, approximately one-third of City of Casey employees have participated in the TMP.

“Our Council participated in a Management Challenge.  Using TMP for our first team session saved us incredible time as we could identify different working styles and assign individuals specific tasks of the project that would play to their strengths. Normally this might take months to discover in a team, but using TMP we were able to bring the team together and within hours they were working collaboratively and highly effectively.”

Janet Reid, Head of Community Facility Management

In some areas of the organisation, smaller, more intimate sessions were designed to explore and unpack key themes and opportunities within the team.  For other departments, larger workshops were held, bringing together up to 40 participants with sub-team breakout sessions to facilitate deeper exploration of specific topics. These larger sessions allowed for an introduction to core TMP concepts in a group setting, followed by dedicated time for each team to engage more deeply with their own results in the latter half of the workshop. Cross-functional collaboration was also encouraged to build connections across teams.

New starters who join a team where TMP has already been completed are encouraged by their leader to complete a profile and join a virtual debrief session.  These are internally delivered once per month. Advanced Reports are also used to help integrate new team members, as well as to analyse functional teams, cross-functional teams and leadership teams.

OUTCOME

All leaders are asked to run a team session after the formal debrief to internalise their findings and delve into the Types of Work for their team.  They are also asked to run Colour Meetings, use the Pacing and My Team diagnostic tools and share their profiles with others in the team and with stakeholders outside their team.

The success of the leadership development program relies on leaders taking ownership of their teams' engagement with the TMP. Many teams have dedicated time in discussions and planning sessions specifically for TMP activities, including Colour Meetings.

A commonly cited benefit among teams is that they have a much greater understanding of each other and team preferences as a result of participating in the TMP workshops.This shared insight has led many teams to improve collaboration and communication, with some even restructuring tasks or adjusting approaches to better align with team members' strengths.

Today, the TMP is firmly established as the City of Casey's primary tool for creating high-performing teams across the City of Casey.

“The TMP has been an excellent tool as our team undertook a major realignment.  Staff were moved to form new teams and using the TMP helped the new teams form, understand each other’s different styles and plan according to their strengths and gaps.  One team, full of Thruster-Organisers, now holds regular “Blue Meetings” to address the gap in their team.”

Janet Reid, Head of Community Facility Management