Jessica Battersby first started with G8 Education 14 years ago when it was a family-run business with 10 childcare centres scattered around South-East Queensland.

Today the impressive company has around 470 centres across Australia and a team of 10,000 employees and a reputation as one of Australia’s largest providers of quality early childhood education and care.

Jessica first joined the Human Resources team at G8 and has held a number of roles in executive leadership including General Manager of People and Culture.

In February 2021, Jessica transitioned into the role of Head of Capability, which saw her building and delivering capability strategy, capability development programs, learning frameworks and creating roadmaps for organisational growth.

Based on their reputation for leadership mentoring and development, Executive Performance Partners were engaged for selected senior leaders, including Jessica, to support the delivery of future operating models and capability strategies.

Our Scorecard for Success

As with every client, Executive Performance Partners started with the development of Jessica’s Scorecard for Success. Jessica’s scorecard was split into four interlinking stages: transition, strategy, implementation and development.

Within these stages, Jessica had core goals she wanted to achieve:

• Seek clarity around the new role and set clear expectations
• Grow her confidence in knowing her previous capability in HR gave her an incredible background and expertise to lead the new role
• Draw on the diverse background of the executive coach, to provide functional expertise, support and guidance in the first few months of the new role.
• Provide support and mentorship as she developed a new strategy
• Provide support and mentorship as she executed the strategy.

To achieve this, Executive Performance Partners held a full day workshop with Jessica to develop a clear strategy, set guidelines for the new role and break down the plan into tactics.

Afterwards, they met regularly in the first few months of the partnership.

This has now become more formalised weekly coaching sessions, with additional check-ins and ad hoc support as required.  Jessica also calls as needed in between the formal meetings, as one-off opportunities and challenges arise.

Jessica has found by having these structured check-ins and sessions, she is held accountable to meet her key objectives and not lose sight of the bigger picture.

Another key area Jessica has found great enjoyment in is connecting with her three Ps – proud, professional and proven. In action, these are:

• Be proud of the work achieved. Celebrate the wins, while learning from challenges
• Show professionalism through strategy, implementation and strong leadership.
• Lead through proven success.

In less than six months, Jessica has seen incredible progress and started to feel confident that the roadmap was working for her personally, for her colleagues and the organisation.

Testimonial

“I’ve worked with a number of executive coaches over the years, but David Munro at Executive Performance Partners is just different. He uses a combination of positive reinforcement, knowledge-based learning and mentoring, while always holding you accountable to your scorecard.

“He has really guided and helped me with the transition into my new role. I’ve really appreciated having the opportunity to work side-by-side with him as we build a clear strategy and into the next phase of implementation.

“He has really helped provide clarity and improve my confidence. He is very good at reading people and knowing instantly what you require and what you need, and he uses this to tailor his individual approach.

“Some coaches rely on the same tools out of their toolkit and can be very theoretic with their approach, while he is more practical and likes to challenge your thinking. I really value that and like that he will call me out and challenge me if I take the safe route.

“He always asks us to reflect on where we want to be and how we can shift that mindset to provide real forward-thinking evidence based approaches across the organisation.

“He is persistent and will make you always come back to the core strategy and what the scorecard for success looks like. It’s this honest and authentic approach which means you often say ‘we’ rather than ‘I’, because they are your real partner not just a consultant.”