Water Utilities | Team Leader Development Program | Program design, facilitation and review
From capable doers to effective leaders
Team Leaders play a pivotal role in translating organisational priorities into everyday performance.
Their effectiveness depends not only on managing work, but on building trust, setting clear expectations, developing people and working across organisational boundaries.
For Yarra Valley Water, the opportunity was to develop its next generation of leaders while creating greater consistency in leadership practice across a diverse workforce.
The starting point was a pilot within Retail Services, where I partnered with Divisional Managers to co-design a development program for Team Leaders. Four interactive workshops focused on core people leadership responsibilities, supported by practical tools, peer connection and opportunities to apply learning on the job.
Positive feedback from the Retail Services Divisional Managers and participants prompted Yarra Valley Water to extend the program across the organisation, and we ultimately delivered it to all Team Leaders over four years.
Rather than simply replicate the pilot each time, we used post-implementation reviews and ongoing listening sessions to understand what was working, what needed refining and where additional support could help Team Leaders translate learning into practice.
This commitment to continuous improvement became a defining feature of the partnership.
A shared understanding of effective leadership
Expanding the program across divisions brought an important challenge into focus. Team Leaders worked in different functions, with different operational responsibilities, but needed a common understanding of what effective team leadership looks like.
Through a discovery process involving program alumni and Divisional Managers, we developed The Role of a Team Leader: a visual summary of the core responsibilities expected of Team Leaders at Yarra Valley Water.
It brought together essential people leadership practices, including building trust, setting expectations, coaching, developing others, providing feedback and holding people accountable.
Importantly, it positioned these responsibilities as necessary within and across teams. Team Leaders needed to deliver outcomes through their own people, collaborate across functions, navigate competing priorities, and contribute to broader organisational goals.
The visual provided a common language for leadership expectations without overlooking the diversity of Team Leader roles. It also became an organising principle for refreshing the program architecture and strengthening the balance between Yarra Valley Water's people-first culture and its expectations around performance, accountability and organisational contribution.
Making the work the place where learning happens
Defining effective leadership was one challenge. Helping Team Leaders demonstrate those behaviours consistently was another.
As the program evolved, we placed increasing emphasis on what happened between workshops, recognising that understanding a leadership concept does not necessarily translate into using it when the opportunity arises.
The expanded program brought together six core modules covering connection and trust, coaching and development, innovation and change, mental health and wellbeing, optimising performance, and leveraging diverse perspectives. Specialist providers contributed to relevant modules, while Yarra Valley Water's own leaders helped ground the learning in the organisation's operating environment through Q&A leadership discussions.
Three elements became particularly important in supporting application.
Leadership Assignments created opportunities to practise
Each module included a targeted workplace assignment, typically centred on a real leadership conversation.
Rather than adding substantial work, these Leadership Assignments encouraged participants to approach existing responsibilities differently: asking more curious questions, clarifying expectations, seeking alternative perspectives or creating opportunities for others to take greater ownership.
The design was deliberately modest in scale but ambitious in intent. A conversation handled differently could change how a team member felt, thought or acted, creating benefits beyond the individual leader's development.
Peer coaching made reflection and accountability part of the journey
Between workshops, Team Leaders met in small peer groups to share their experiences, discuss Leadership Assignments and work through challenges together.
These conversations helped participants move beyond understanding what effective leadership looked like to exploring what it required in their own circumstances.
They also strengthened cross-divisional relationships, allowing Team Leaders to learn from colleagues whose responsibilities and perspectives differed from their own.
Facilitated internally, these peer coaching sessions provided another benefit: ongoing insight into the challenges participants faced and examples of how they applied their learning. This feedback helped inform further program refinements.
Practical resources made the learning accessible beyond the program
A Team Leader Guidebook connected leadership expectations with key concepts, activities, assignments and resources.
It provided a reference point participants could return to when preparing for conversations, reflecting on their leadership or applying a new approach.
Together, these elements - Leadership Assignments, peer coaching and practical resources - provided ongoing cycles of learning, application and reflection that extended beyond individual workshops.
The evolving role of Divisional Managers
As the program evolved, so did the role of Divisional Managers and how they supported participants before, during, and after the program.
We introduced a dedicated sponsorship session to help Divisional Managers reflect on their role in developing other leaders and identify practical ways to reinforce learning in everyday work.
A subset of Divisional Managers also became Module Mentors, participating in workshops, contributing to Leadership Q&A discussions and joining peer coaching conversations.
Their involvement brought organisational context and lived leadership experience into the learning. Participants could explore real challenges with more senior leaders, while Divisional Managers gained greater visibility into the issues Team Leaders were navigating.
This helped connect the development to the wider leadership environment in which participants were being asked to apply their learning.
What changed, and what we learned
By the conclusion of the most recent cohort, approximately 90 Team Leaders had participated in the program across Yarra Valley Water.
Feedback gathered from Divisional Managers provided encouraging evidence of growth in everyday leadership practice, with five themes standing out:
Greater clarity of direction and expectations. Team Leaders were more deliberate in setting priorities, communicating expectations and creating alignment.
Growing confidence and leadership presence. Team Leaders stepped into unfamiliar situations, contributed more confidently, and showed greater awareness of their influence.
Stronger collaboration and influence across teams. Managers observed Team Leaders engaging stakeholders, working across organisational boundaries and contributing to broader outcomes.
Making more space for others to be heard. Team Leaders demonstrated greater curiosity, empathy, and consideration of different perspectives.
Thinking more strategically. Team Leaders showed stronger systems thinking and greater confidence in navigating complexity and balancing competing priorities.
The feedback included specific examples of these changes.
One Divisional Manager observed: "You've done an excellent job setting clearer expectations and direction while giving your team the space to learn and grow. Your stronger delegation and open-ended questioning are truly empowering them."
Another noted: "Your growing influence across teams and strong advocacy for systems thinking in Asset Planning have delivered real operational efficiencies."
These observations highlight changes in how leaders were working, not just what they learned. They also reflect an important shift in the type of leadership demonstrated: from managing immediate responsibilities to creating clarity, developing others and influencing outcomes beyond the team.
While this feedback provides qualitative evidence of behavioural growth, the program's longer-term contribution to organisational performance is still being evaluated.
Nevertheless, the partnership also generated an important learning about leadership development itself.
Successive cohorts did not simply receive the same program. Their experiences, along with feedback from Divisional Managers, informed changes to the learning architecture, workplace assignments, peer coaching, and sponsorship arrangement.
The organisation was not only developing leaders. It was learning how to develop them more effectively.
The value of building on what works
Yarra Valley Water's sustained investment created more than a program that could be delivered organisation-wide.
It established shared leadership expectations, practical resources, stronger cross-divisional connections and a more active role for senior leaders in developing others.
Perhaps most importantly, it demonstrated the value of treating leadership development as something to continually improve, rather than periodically replace.
Each cohort benefited from the experience of those before it. Each review created an opportunity to strengthen the conditions supporting behaviour change.
The investment grew in value because Yarra Valley Water kept building on it. Developing better Team Leaders and getting better at developing them became two outcomes of the same commitment.