Creating great leaders

At Cera Care, we specialise in supporting people with a range of needs, including those with complex care needs and people living with a learning disability. Our team is almost 10,000 colleagues strong, which means we need a lot of great leaders in place to ensure we’re delivering the best care possible.

Over the past five years, I've held various roles within the organisation, and now, as a learning and development business partner, I focus on ensuring our staff have the skills, knowledge, and leadership capabilities to succeed in a challenging yet rewarding environment. In my time with the company, I've seen first hand how effective leadership development can transform not just the performance of individuals but the culture of an entire organisation.

Creating structured career pathways for staff is a key priority for Cera - empowering all our employees to fulfil their potential and make continual progress in their careers.

We believe capable leadership is one of the most important factors in enabling staff to fulfil their potential. We also know first-hand the vital role leaders play in creating a positive company culture with high job satisfaction and retention.

We wanted all our leaders across the business to create environments where staff felt supported, empowered and understand how to progress. So, we explored options for learning programmes that could support this belief. We identified Skills for Care’s ‘Well-led’ and ‘Lead to Succeed’ programmes, which have played a significant role in our leadership development strategy since.

Well-led is a development programme for both new and experienced managers of adult social care services and is designed to enable leaders to deliver care in line with the expectations of a well-led service. Lead to succeed is a learning programme intended to help individuals to develop their leadership and management potential. Both programmes offered a structured way to develop our management and leadership team’s skills for better delivery and care outcomes. Initially, we brought in external providers to deliver the training, but over time we realised the importance of tailoring these sessions to fit our organisation’s needs better and began internal delivery.

The impact on our company culture has been remarkable. In ‘Lead to Succeed’ in particular, the supervision module was particularly impactful. It helped our leaders understand the importance of creating a positive, supportive atmosphere during supervision sessions, making them into something that should be celebrated, rather than feared. It shifted supervision from a box-ticking exercise into a meaningful dialogue, boosting engagement.

Through both programmes, we’ve seen our leaders truly embrace their roles as culture champions. We equipped them with the tools to foster a workplace where team members feel empowered, understand their career progression opportunities, and are motivated to stay and grow with the company.

To get some real evidence of the programmes’ effectiveness, we conducted an evaluation of each. This allowed us to measure the impact of the training through concrete measures, such as internal promotions, productivity, and retention.

We found 50% of participants were internally promoted within 12 months of completion. Additionally, we saw increased productivity and hours worked where leaders had completed the training. We also saw retention rates surge –demonstrating the impact great leadership training was having.

While the benefits have been clear, the journey hasn’t been without its challenges. Initially, when we relied on external providers, the biggest hurdle was getting staff to commit to the full day of training. Smaller branches struggled with capacity, which sometimes led to training being missed, and there was limited understanding of the value these courses would provide.

When we started delivering the programmes internally, that allowed us to address many of these challenges. We were able to split modules up into multiple sessions and shorten them to half days. This provided us with much more flexibility when it came to giving people time to complete their learning.

Eventually, the courses became more well known and selection for the courses became more of a challenge. People started to realise how effective these courses were, so we had to establish a nomination process and began delivering course introduction sessions where we invited previous participants to discuss their experience. This has been a really effective way of instilling the value of the course as it’s coming from participants, rather than senior leadership.

These programmes are now integrated with our leadership career pathways, which are closely mapped to the Care Workforce Pathways which became available last year. Neither programme is mandatory, but they are now commonly known across the business, which provides excellent visibility for those who previously didn’t understand what their options were to progress.

If you're considering enrolling your staff in programmes like ‘Well-led’ or ‘Lead to Succeed’, I strongly recommend investing in your people, especially if you want to increase internal promotions. It’s essential to equip staff with the leadership skills they need to succeed, not just in performing their roles but in managing teams and building great workplace cultures.

Also, don’t overlook the importance of fostering a supportive, empowering environment. Simple things like making sure supervisions are positive, forward-thinking experiences can make a huge difference. It’s the small, human touches—like taking time to listen, offering a cup of tea during meetings, or celebrating small victories—that create a culture where people want to stay and grow.

For those looking to deliver training internally, my advice is to make the programmes your own. Tailoring the content to fit your organisation’s specific needs, culture, and challenges will ensure your leaders gain the most from the experience and apply their learning effectively.

The ‘Well-Led’ and ‘Lead to Succeed’ programmes have been instrumental in helping us create a more engaged, productive, and happier workforce. By investing in these programmes, we’ve seen a significant shift in our culture, and I believe the benefits will only continue to grow as more leaders go through the training.

Be sure to visit our ‘Leadership programmes and CPD’ page to find out more about ‘Lead to succeed’ and ‘Well-led’. Both of these programmes can be funded using the Adult Social Care Learning and Development Support Scheme (LDSS)

Print this page