Our mission
We offer a transformative experience, generating knowledge and stimulating self-discovery through creative, radical and intellectually rigorous thinking and practice

Foster a staff development culture which focuses on facilitative rather than authoritarian interventions. In other words supportive, cathartic, catalytic, and occasionally challenging interventions, rather than informing and prescribing

Achieving academic excellence

1. Pursuing intellectual curiosity
2. Encouraging the highest standards of research and excellence

Provide a responsive network of support for senior managers and academics, including individualised coaching programmes and action learning sets to facilitate the sharing of problems and good practice

Embracing complexity

1. Building on our diverse strengths – academic excellence and rigour inspired by radical thinking
2. Providing a unique and creative approach to all our subjects

Facilitate strategic planning activities for academic and admin teams based on appreciative inquiry and other imaginative team building activities

Respecting the individual

1. Encouraging individuality and nurturing talent
2. Enabling freedom of thought and expression

Help to create a coaching culture in which coaching and mentoring operates formally and informally, in individual departments and across the whole college

Encourage managers at all levels to set an example by coaching people who report to them and mentoring junior colleagues in other departments

Embracing diversity

1. Having the courage to think differently
2. Providing the freedom to experiment
3. Working beyond the boundaries of preconceptions

Use experiential and action learning techniques to create a safe and confidential environment to address problems and experiment with new approaches

Focus on providing individualised learning programmes as and when people need them, rather than large scale mandatory programmes (unless commonsense risk assessment dictates otherwise)

Radical thinking

1. Being the leader in all our fields
2. Daring to think differently and to challenge the norms

Connect with leading edge departments in Goldsmiths to explore innovative ways of creating new opportunities for staff development.

Develop a collaborative management programme with Queen Mary University of London and develop other services with the federal University of London and the 1994 Group.

Maintain a high profile on national staff development bodies such as the Staff Development Forum, the Leadership Foundation for HE, and the Higher Education Academy

Generating change, locally and globally

1. Being socially aware and socially active
2. Enhancing employability in rewarding careers
3. Actively promoting sustainability
4. Fostering a social and intellectual community within, and beyond, Goldsmiths

Work with the Communications and Publicity to facilitate a Staff Volunteering scheme which will create valuable personal development opportunities for staff without interfering with their ‘day job’.

This scheme will complement and learn from the very successful Student’s Union volunteering scheme.