Working Together Grade 6 Example — 500-Word Statement

STwo of our directorates shared responsibility for a £6 million digital service transformation. One owned the technology, the other owned the operational teams who would use it. Meetings had become battlegrounds, decisions were relitigated between sessions, and the programme had slipped four months. Both directors privately told me the other was the problem, and staff in both teams described the other directorate as difficult to work with.

TAs the Grade 6 brought in to lead the programme, my first task was to repair the relationship between the directorates, rebuild one shared plan and create a way of working that would outlast the individuals involved.

AI spent my first three weeks listening. I met both directors individually, then their deputies and team leads, asking the same questions: what does success look like, what are you worried about, what would you stop doing. I wrote up the answers and noticed both sides wanted the same outcome but disagreed about decision rights. I also reviewed six months of board minutes to trace where decisions had unravelled, which confirmed the problem was structure, not personalities. Rather than broker a private deal, I brought the two leadership groups into one room and shared back what I had heard, carefully including the uncomfortable points. Naming the tension openly, without blame, changed the tone of the conversation. I proposed we rebuild the programme's governance together. I facilitated a session where both directorates mapped every decision the programme needed, then agreed who decided, who advised and who had to be consulted. We co-wrote it onto a single page that both directors signed there and then in the meeting. I asked each director to nominate a deputy with real authority, so decisions no longer waited for the most senior person in the room, and I set up a joint programme board with alternating chairs and a standing rule that either directorate could add an agenda item. When the old pattern resurfaced and one team made a unilateral change to the rollout plan, I raised it at the board rather than in a corridor conversation, and we re-affirmed the decision rights we had agreed. I also worked on the human side. I merged two duplicated weekly meetings into one joint session, paired operational leads with digital leads on each workstream, and organised a joint away day where the teams planned the next phase together. I briefed both directorates' staff jointly, so nobody heard news secondhand, and I published a short monthly note celebrating joint milestones, written in both directors' names.

RWithin three months the programme was back on schedule and delivered its first release to 800 users on the revised date, with internal audit moving delivery confidence from red to green. The shared decision framework survived both directors moving on, and the two directorates have since run two further projects through the same joint board rather than revert to old habits. The sponsor group asked me to write the approach up as guidance for other shared programmes.