Using positive psychology for learning and organisational development
One of the areas of speciality that I’ve been developing and focusing on is the application of positive psychology to learning and organisational development. Below, I share some examples of how positive psychology has been used to develop a solution for the organisation.
An International Trades Company
I worked with Adey, an international company, helping their sales leaders. They were already a high performing group, and what they needed to do was develop their cohesion as a team. Using the PERMA model, we worked on developing understanding areas such as:
How to express appreciation and recognition to team members
How to acknowledge personal strengths and influence of these on skills
Problem solving live issues and collaborating on solutions
Understanding high performance as a team vs individual achievements
Spending time informally as a team and developing personal connections
Developing their resilience
The use of positive psychology in this instance was to develop the capability of the team, improving their resilience, and focus on the cohesion of the team.
Front-line workers
The leader of a team of front-line workers at Flagship Homes in Norwich wanted to provide personal development to his team. This group were a typical group of front-line workers where the work is manual in nature, with responsibilities such as grounds maintenance, low-level repairs and resident engagement. It’s common for front-line workers to not receive much in the way of personal development.
Through a series of workshops, we worked on the following:
Giving them practical tools for building personal resilience
Developing their ‘psychological capital’ - their ability and capability to deal with a range of taxing situations without feeling overwhelmed or overly-stressed
Improved understanding of how day-to-day situations can lead to new triggers that spark emotional reactions and how to manage these in different ways
Exploration of resilience and wellbeing activities
Developing an understanding of how to partner with internal communications team to share the many forms of good work they achieve
By completing a pre and post questionnaire, we were able to see an improvement in psychological capital as a result of the workshops. In real terms, this meant the team felt more capable of dealing with difficult day-to-day situations, could express their emotions in safe ways to team members, and had improved capability for collaborating for resident’s needs.
Get in touch if you’d like to discuss your situation and how we can help.
