We want people to feel with us more than to act for us. George Eliot

When two very different leaders in a large public sector department were given the task of working together to transform a specialist service with a budget running into tens of millions of pounds they faced a string of challenges.

One was a front-line professional, used to dealing with customers on a day-to-day basis. The other was a professional manager, more accustomed to managing budgets and staffing levels. So their first challenge was to blend their talents so that they could steer a diverse team of hundreds of professionals through a period of significant change in which a network of small local teams were being incorporated under the umbrella of one huge expanded service line.

The challenge was even greater because of what was at stake. The decisions they made were significant for thousands of people. If they didn’t gel and function fully as a whole service, then jobs and maybe even lives would have been lost.

Tammy worked closely with them, helping them to appreciate and understand each other’s strengths so that they could build a relationship and have productive conversations that allowed them to co-lead the project together. She then helped them to work from the ground up to create a system and management structure that would allow them to deliver their services whilst at the same time staying connected to their staff and management - and each other.

It wasn’t easy. Both of them had to revolutionise the way they worked. They had to draw on the strengths of their old disciplines, but learn new skills too. Tammy spent a year working alongside them, by which time they’d learned to do things differently and had created a resilient and sustainable organisation that was delivering its all-important services efficiently and professionally.

• organisational development