As with so many organisations at the moment, there is a constant challenge to redesign the shape of the business to meet future challenges.  There can be little doubt that those who approach this by remembering their values and putting their people first tend to have a much higher success rate in terms of embracing change.

One of our lovely clients, the award winning City South Manchester Housing Trust in Manchester, who are particularly good at this recently set us a challenge!  They had identified a need for all their people managers to develop a specific skill  - hopefully one they wouldn’t need to use too often but nevertheless very important – How to Carry Out Effective Investigations!

As we all know, managing people effectively is usually the most challenging part of anyone’s role in any organisation, especially when something goes wrong or someone makes a complaint about someone. This is where being able to carry out a thorough, fair and impartial workplace investigation comes in.  

Lisa Manzano, the HR Manager explained that “As it’s not something that generally happens very often, people’s first reaction is often to panic a little and try and find someone to help do it for them i.e. us! So we wanted to be able to equip managers with the skills and confidence to be able to do it themselves.”

This was a new challenge for us at Pulse as it wasn’t something we’d delivered before and we were delighted to be asked to help. In conjunction with one of our specialist collaborators, we set about defining the purpose and aims with the team at City South so that we could develop exactly what was required and then over 4 days in July, we delivered two development programmes for almost every manager in the organisation. 

Using the formal investigation process as a framework, we initially worked with people to increase their understanding of advanced communication techniques, as well as the strategic importance that the investigation process represents to an organisation. We included technical aspects such as unpicking organisational policies and a highly interactive session which allowed people to put their understanding into practice. This revealed City South to have some definite contenders for Best Actor and Actress in next year’s BAFTA’s! 

Rewardingly for us, the feedback from people on what had potentially been quite a “dry” though necessary topic, was great! The acid test of course will be how confident people feel next time they need to carry out an investigation and judging by many of the comments including “It’s not as daunting as first thought”, we’re very hopeful on that front!

For more information on bespoke and cost effective leadership and management development for your people and to arrange a free needs analysis., please email us at

 info@pulsetraininganddevelopment.co.uk