The Engaging Managers content team was made up of:
- Francis Goss from Grass Roots,
- Steve Jones from Skills for Business,
- Tashoy Ashley from University of Greenwich,
- John Oliver from Northern Leadership Academy
- Greg Ward from Nampak.
We spoke to Francis and he explained how people from across all corners of the movement worked together to bring this content to the web :
“We began the project with a briefing conference call led by Ruth Lawton and Kiran Sondhi from the Engage for Success core team. Ruth and Kiran highlighted the importance of the Engage for Success website and the vital role that the content would play. Ensuring that ideas and tools were made freely available to all was a key part of the mission. They also provided some structure and best practice to ensure that all of the content teams were following broadly the same guidelines on how to select content for the website.
Our first team call occurred shortly afterwards during which we agreed our team goals and set up fortnightly update calls to keep each other informed of our activities and progress in collecting content. We also familiarised ourselves with Basecamp, the online collaboration tool enabling us to upload content to a central repository.
We decided to give each team member overall responsibility for a specific content type. For example, Tashoy agreed to take on hints, tips and opinions. This helped provide focus whilst still providing the opportunity for everyone to contribute.
As we started to populate basecamp, it became clear that we had plenty of content in some areas such as case studies, but limited or no content in other areas such as videos. We agreed to address this gap by creating our own content. For example, Steve videoed colleagues on their views of what makes an engaging Manager and I did a piece to camera on the Characteristics of Engaging Managers.
Our final review call had a clear objective – to go through all the content for each content type and identify 10 pieces of content from each content type to put through to the website. This would ensure that we had a good spread of content for day one of the website going live and also ensure we had a quality pipeline of content for the future uploads. To decide the pieces that would be used for day one, we used a consistent review criteria.
The final output was a compilation of varied content including case studies, ideas, hints, tips and videos aimed at informing and equipping visitors with helpful information relating to the Engaging Managers enabler.
It was good working as part of virtual team with people from different organisations, all with the common aim of proving compelling content for the Engaging Managers section of the website. We all learned from each other and enjoyed the regular update calls, and most importantly, contributing to Engage for Success. Thanks to all the team involved!”
