The Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) provides an innovative mentoring program for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students to support them through high school and into university. Beginning in 2005 with just 25 mentors and 25 mentees, AIME is now the largest education support service for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander high school students in Australia.
Founded by Jack Manning Bancroft, AIME are on a journey to becoming a teal organisation. They looked for support from Pop Up to first help them understand where they need to make the biggest shifts in their current organisation to become ‘teal’, then to develop some of their leadership behaviours and ways of working which will enable them to lead in a teal organisation.
So far we have helped AIME over two half day sessions across their journey towards a teal organisation.
Session One, in July 2020, was focused on helping the AIME leadership team to identify and agree a set of organisational priorities to deliver the AIME strategy and shift towards a teal model. We began by unpacking the three pillars of the emerging strategy and getting alignment on the direction of the organisation. We then assessed the current organisation against their vision to be teal organisation, using the Q5 Organisation Effectiveness Model (OEM). This allowed the leaders to identify which dimensions would require the most significant change and where they should prioritise. Finally, we explored the priority areas and agreed some of the guardrails and enablers that should be in place to support a shift to a decentralised organisation.
We came back to support AIME in Session Two in April 2021, this time focused on the leadership behaviours and mindsets that were required to lead effectively in a decentralised, teal organisation. We used C-me Colour Profiling with their top 25 leaders to build awareness of their leadership behaviours and an appreciation for each of their different preferences and strengths. This provided the foundation for an exercise looking at their conflict styles – equipping them with a framework to manage healthy conflict in their leadership team and organisation. We wrapped up the session looking at some case studies of companies that have successful adopted a teal model, looking at the lessons learnt and implications for AIME.
