Director

Associates:

Leigh Bennett

With around 20 years practice as an independent consultant, Bill Cropper has a wealth of experience designing, facilitating and implementing innovative workplace improvement processes on both small and large scale projects, where organisational learning, leadership and change management are the keys to success.

He has an impressive track record undertaking strategic change in different organisation settings and cultural contexts, working in collaborative and constructive learning partnerships with senior executives, managers, facilitators and workteams at all levels to help them navigate their way through change. He has contributed to the learning, leadership and change management capacities of a wide range of federal and state government departments, large instrumentalities, local government and community organisations throughout Australia.

Founding Director and principal of The Change Forum, Bill operates flexibly in a broad spectrum of consulting, strategic planning, OD, HRM, training and change management roles. He has highly developed process consulting, design, facilitation, coaching, writing and leadership skills and proven capabilities for both project managing 'the big picture', facilitating 'at the workface' and dealing with the practicalities to 'make it happen'.  Bill's change-work includes amongst other things:

Bill has a special interest in the application of Peter Senge’s 5 Learning Disciplines to build the learning and leadership capacity of organisations, teams and individuals. He is an advocate of participative, team-based work and learning-centred leadership as keys to sustaining change and creating successful business futures and his consulting assignments consistently embrace coaching and skills transfer as a fundamental strategy in strengthening the learning capacity of organisations and learning communities to be more self-reliant in managing their own change and learning processes.

Bill has a down-to-earth, out-going and open style; personal mastery of a wide range of facilitation tools, techniques and processes and customarily works comfortably with people at all organisation levels – senior executives, operational managers, staff, community members and other consultants. He personally prefers taking a collaborative orientation to projects and is skilled at empowering others to achieve outcomes, helping leaders and teams develop new approaches to workroles and relationships and adopt new values and behaviours to foster participative performance improvement. He is an experienced and prolific writer of process guides, resource kits, skill development manuals and workbooks to support and guide organisations and individuals through change. A few of his longer-term projects have included:

As well as his ongoing passion for learning-centred leadership and team-based approaches to ‘living-at-work’ work, Bill is keenly interested in the benefits of emotional intelligence, conversational coaching and dialogue to promote more productive, open interchanges and facilitate personal growth and change mastery.  For the past several years he has been delivering a very popular series of coaching clinics and leadership forums for forward-thinking leaders on Constructive Conversations, Difficult Discussions, Personal Mastery: Leading with Emotional Intelligence, Leading through Teams, Learning to Lead Change, Leading Learning Schools and The Leader as Coach as well as numerous tailored in-house team development programs collectively themed 'Working Better Together'.

Several of these programs are derived from The Learning-Centred Leadership Series^© of development Modules Bill has developed, which fuse contemporary models of leading change with work-based action-learning and the principles, practices and tools of the 5 Learning Disciplines to provide a robust framework to support individual, team and organisational learning in progressive organisations.  The Series has been listed by the Office of Public Service Merit and Equity (OPSME) as a preferred service to support leadership capability development across government agencies in Queensland.

Bill is a leadership coach for individuals and teams in various organisations, facilitating meetings and conferences from time to time (most recently Qld Health SAHS and DPI Biosecurity FNQ) and is an occasional speaker at conferences and learning forums (when time permits - eg. QASSP Sunshine Coast 2007, IQPC Sydney 1997, CorporateLink CAPTIONS 2006, Leadership Lounge 2007).

Before embarking on his own consultancy business in 1987, Bill lead other lives as a university tutor in medieval English, a lecturer in managerial psychology and organisational behaviour and held senior HRM and management consulting positions with the Industrial Democracy Unit and Department of Industrial Relations in Canberra, the Metal Trades Industry Association in Sydney and the Australian Productivity Council in Melbourne.  He enjoyed a memorable, AusAid-funded 2-year stint in the Pacific as Change Management Adviser to Fiji Police up until the coup, where he played a pivotal role working with senior management teams, taskforces and front-line police to implement strategic, structural and operational changes, improve management and work practices, promote community consultation and HRM reforms and strengthen training quality, service delivery and community policing.

In earlier years Bill has been a drummer, a basketball coach, an ardent traveller and a chef in his south-coast NSW Thai-inspired restaurant 'Typhoon'.  He now lives in the rainforest in Far North Queensland from where he works extensively around Queensland and interstate.

Some of his major clients have included: Queensland Health, NSW Health, Queensland Department of Education, Training & the Arts, Disability Services Queensland, former Qld Dept of Families (now Communities and Child Safety), Qld Parks & Wildlife Service, Qld Dept of State Development, Australian Institute of Marine Science, Hervey Bay City Council, Melbourne City Council, Bega Valley Shire Council, Warringah Council, Department of Employment, Science and Training (Indigenous Education Branch), NSW Corrective Services, Rail Services Australia, SA Water Corporation, Australian Federal Police, NSW Roads & Traffic Authority, ACT Electricity & Water and NSW Office of State Revenue.

billc@thechangeforum.com    OR    +61-(0)7-4068 7591 or Mob: +61-(0)429-687 513