Pharmacy Guild of Australia

The partnership with Leading Teams & the Pharmacy Guild of Australia started initially with Colm Maguire reaching out to Simon Fletcher to help his team when he initially joined the organisation. Previously having worked with Simon when he was CEO of Touch Australia.

The culture of the team was not as sold prior to Colm joining the business and they had to put time into developing the desired culture and behaviours of the team.

The work started with Colm and his departmental managers and then went down to the teams within those departments. Leaders and teams were taking ownership and responsibility of their culture and performance. One of the things that challenged Colm early on was that staff would come to him to talk about issues with other staff members, so there was a big focus on building trust within the teams that empowered them to address things they needed to with each other rather than going through a third party, and giving them some tools and skills to help with these conversations.

One of the challenges working with just one department within an organisation can be the creation of a subculture and this was being observed within The Guild. Colm’s team were doing things ‘a bit different’ to others and when Colm took on the role as COO there was a decision to take an organisational approach.

This began in June 2021 starting with an all-staff session where they reviewed the current state (see table below) and has since involved everyone within the National Secretariat (approx. 70 staff including remote workers).

Currently Leading Teams is delivering High Performing Leadership Programs (approximately 60% of staff have completed), working with the Executive then flowing through to Directors and teams​ and playing a role in the induction of new staff to help support the organisation be high performing. There have been some challenging times through that period with workload and Covid lock downs but the commitment to strong professional relationships and accountability to behaviour has not waivered.

The words below show the transformation, with team members described being asked to pick a word to describe the organisation and that they are much closer to their ideal world than they were in June 2021.

Staff engagement scores in 2021 was 51% this has increased to 84% in 2022, which is a staggering improvement in a relatively short period of time and shows the power of a whole of organisation approach to culture change.

High Performing Teams are now a part of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia’s Employee Value Proposition when recruiting new team members. Leading Teams is also on organisational chart of the Pharmacy Guild of Australia, showing their commitment to on-going cultural change and leadership development.

Listen to this podcast episode to gain further insight into the high performance journey undertaken at The Pharmacy Guild of Australia.