No, Gellibrand Way is not a street name, it’s how Gellibrand Support Services goes about its mission of supporting people with a disability to achieve the outcomes they want as valued members of the community.
As a team member at Gellibrand for more than a year, Communications Lead Paul Mitchell often heard about the ‘Gellibrand Way’. He wanted to know more about it so he interviewed Margaret Given, Gellibrand’s Customer Wellbeing Manager, who has more than 30 years’ disability sector experience.
PM: Margaret, what is the Gellibrand Way?
MG: It’s everything that is Gellibrand. It’s how we define our supports, it is the guardrail to make sure we stay within the scope of who we are and what we do. We have it so that our culture doesn’t get impacted negatively. If we all come to the table in the same headspace then we all deliver the same service – because we agree on the service that we’re supposed to be delivering. So, that for me is the Gellibrand Way. It’s who we are, how we function – a set of deliverables that we can give to clients, their families, and other stakeholders, and say, ‘This is what we’re going to deliver’.
PM: So, the Gellibrand Way outlines what people can expect of the organisation, while keeping Gellibrand accountable internally and externally?
MG: Absolutely. It also means that team members know what they are signing up for. It means they can deliver consistent support. One of the things I like about the Gellibrand Way is that it was developed with team members. We said to them: ‘Tell us about Gellibrand. What makes Gellibrand? What’s its essence? What’s the pulse of Gellibrand?’ The Gellibrand Way came from what they told us, as well as guardrails we had in place previously.
It’s things like putting people first. That has always been one of our mantras. ‘Real people, real connection, real service, real outcomes’ was another one of our tag lines. We had developed a couple of unofficial tag lines over the years and we melded them into our Gellibrand Way document.
PM: I would imagine an approach like that to creating the Gellibrand Way is going to work because it’s not top down. It has emerged from within the organisation, through observation of what’s bringing everyone together.
MG: Very much so. It was developed over time and with a range of people. It had never been captured, never documented or written down. Then some people came into the organisation and said, ‘We hear about the Gellibrand Way but what is that? Is there some way we can capture that?’ That was quite a challenge to ask what is the essence of Gellibrand in terms of how we provide service. It was a good challenge, however, and we enjoyed it.
It’s now a document that means everybody can be on the same page and, whether you’re delivering service or receiving service, you know what the expectation is, and it absolutely has the clients first and foremost.
Now, we accept and we understand that every disability organisation says they put clients first. But at Gellibrand we really believe that we do.
There was a person with a disability who was sleeping on a park bench. And the NDIS called us and said there is no guarantee of any funding, we don’t know how this is going to pan out, but could you please take this person in? And our answer could only be yes. Because we put people first. We’re about real outcomes – and getting that person off a park bench they were sleeping on was a real outcome. It wasn’t about the system, the process, the policies, or whether we were going to get funded. It was about who we as a community organisation. We have to give back to the community.
PM: Feedback I have received from clients and their families tells me that putting people first is very much an active principle at Gellibrand.
MG: Yes, it’s one of the things that keeps me here. We are truly client focused.
PM: It seems to me that the Gellibrand Way is prescriptive to an extent, but it’s not a set of regulations.
MG: It’s the how of what we do. The mission statement is the what, the Gellibrand Way is how we do it. It allows team members to say, ‘I need to achieve this today, which is the best part of the Gellibrand Way that I can use to achieve it?’
It is meant to be flexible and interpreted flexibly depending on the situation that you are in and the person who you are supporting and what they may or may not be going through in that moment.
Click the image below to view the full-size infographic of “The Gellibrand Way”.
