Helping the UN to deliver change and reform

Most people will have heard of the United Nations and have some idea of what it does. What many won’t know is that it is an organisation made up of over 50 specialist agencies, committees and offices. Helen was asked by one of these to help with an important change programme.

The FAO, employing over 6,000 staff worldwide to help them achieve their mission, engaged Helen over a three-year period, to help them drive through an important $40m reform programme aimed at improving organisational effectiveness. Helen worked with various divisions and teams, delivering a combination of consultancy advice, facilitation and coaching programmes.

Because Helen’s change management skills are quite rare within the UN, FAO asked Helen to work on a wide range of programmes.

Working directly for the Deputy Director General, Helen carried out a strategic review of the effectiveness of internal and change communications, culminating in a report with clear recommendations for senior managers.

She then moved into the Reform Programme Office, working for the Change Director, with a small team of programme specialists, and developed and implemented the first ever pan-FAO change communication strategy to support its reform programme.

Helen was also commissioned by FAO’s Policy Division to design and facilitate a variety of important leadership and management retreats, for technical and non-technical teams. These were interesting and challenging, as they marked the beginning of tackling poor, entrenched behaviours amongst both leaders and staff.

Working with the Corporate Services Division, Helen also developed and rolled out the first ever employee survey at FAO, a substantial undertaking requiring external assistance and advanced statistical analysis. She also put in place a communications network and trained its members in change management and change communication.

One of the key work streams within the Reform Programme was the implementation of a major Oracle ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. Helen developed the change management strategy to guide this rollout.

Helen is most proud of her work with FAO’s nutrition community (a large group of leaders and managers with longstanding, entrenched and differing views on the solutions to starvation and malnutrition) to put in place FAO’s strategy to eradicate world hunger. This is a very high-profile strategy, very much in the public domain and subject to significant external scrutiny. Over a period of six months, Helen designed the process needed to produce the strategy, brought this dysfunctional community together, helped them thrash out their issues and delivered a strategy that was universally recognised as a step change in FAO’s approach to world hunger. Every member of the nutrition community could see their work in this new strategy that was published in 2011.

Helen’s contribution at FAO was to bring into the organisation a new set of skills around change management, change communication, facilitation and coaching, and a new, more robust approach to change work. This has improved human resource management at FAO and helped leaders, in particular, to understand what is needed to ensure high standards for change and change management.

This represents a significant departure from before Helen’s arrival. Now FAO regularly recruits people with change skills to deliver important programmes for the organisation.