Case Study
Building a strategic L&D foundation at the University of Sunderland
| Organisation | University of Sunderland |
| Sector | Higher Education |
| Size | Large HEI – multiple campuses |
| What we did | Design and delivery of leadership development workshops and a bespoke wellbeing programme series, plus 1:1 coaching |
| Services | Bespoke Leadership Development, Wellbeing Programme Design, 1:1 Coaching |
The Situation
The University of Sunderland had a new Associate Director of Organisational Development in post, tasked with building a strategic L&D offering from the ground up. Previously, development had been ad hoc – responding to individual requests rather than addressing the organisation’s capability needs in any joined-up way.
With a new OD team being recruited and a clear mandate to do things differently, the University needed an expert external partner quickly. The brief was specific: design and deliver leadership development that could work across academic and professional services staff at different seniority levels, and that could be facilitated internally as the OD team grew into the role.
The relationship grew from there. What started as three leadership workshops became something more substantial – and more telling about what an organisation can achieve when it starts listening to what its people actually need.
What We Did
We designed and delivered three interactive leadership development workshops – Introduction to People Management, Leading Change & Improvement, and Build & Lead a High-Performing Team. Each was designed to work across both academic and professional services audiences, blending evidence-based thinking with practical application in a way that didn’t feel generic to either group.
The quality of the work opened the door to a second commission: a Wellbeing Series for the whole institution. Internal survey feedback had flagged a clear need – staff wanted better support on managing their own wellbeing and that of their teams. Rather than designing a single catch-all workshop, we diagnosed that different groups had genuinely different needs and designed three separate sessions: one for managers, one for wellbeing champions, and one for all staff.
The approach throughout was the same: understand what the organisation actually needs, then build something specific to that – not a repackaged off-the-shelf programme.
What Changed
The University of Sunderland now has a coherent L&D offering that didn’t exist before – workshops that can be facilitated internally or by Upwrd, covering leadership and wellbeing across different staff groups and seniority levels.
The speed with which the relationship expanded from three workshops to a full wellbeing series says something about the quality of the partnership. When an organisation trusts that an external partner genuinely understands their context and will design something that fits – rather than something that was built for someone else – they come back.
