HRM560 Training Program: In-House Leadership Development at Atlassian

This report details the design and development of an in-house leadership training program for Atlassian, addressing needs identified in a prior assessment. It covers the importance of the program, participant selection, and benefits for both individuals and the organization. The plan includes objectives rooted in learning theories, a schedule of activities, delivery methods, and trainer instructions. The training evaluation emphasizes data analysis from post-training feedback. The program aims to enhance communication, motivation, and coaching skills among leaders, aligning leadership with improved customer service and quality.

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Training and Development
In-House Training Program
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Executive Summary
The aim of this report is to design and develop an in-house training program to
address the training and development needs of leadership skills identified in assessment 2.
The training program focuses on leadership skills development. Currently, development of
software at Atlassian demands a high level of core knowledge and skills of employees about
information technology. The reason to focus on leadership development program is to make
them gain unique string skills to direct employees towards achieving quality services,
increased production, and awareness about the needed changes. The goal of the training and
development program is to make leaders gain communication, motivational, and coaching
skills. The results indicate that focusing on leadership will help respond to the skill gap at
Atlassian and align leadership with customer services and quality improvement. It is
concluded that training evaluation will depend on analysis of data collected at post-training
from employees and leaders.

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Table of Contents
Executive Summary...............................................................................................................................2
Introduction...........................................................................................................................................4
Organisation..........................................................................................................................................4
Overview of Atlassian Corporation....................................................................................................4
Importance of training program........................................................................................................5
Participants............................................................................................................................................6
Explanation of the cohort of who need to participate in the program..............................................6
The Benefit of the program to The Participants................................................................................9
Program Plan.......................................................................................................................................12
Detailed Plan...................................................................................................................................12
Program Objectives.........................................................................................................................13
Schedule and planned activities......................................................................................................14
Method of Delivery..........................................................................................................................14
Instructions for the Trainer..............................................................................................................15
Training Evaluation..........................................................................................................................17
Conclusion...........................................................................................................................................17
References...........................................................................................................................................18

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Introduction
Organizations conduct needs assessment activities in different departments to help
them identify existing gaps. Consequently, it is from the identified gaps that human resource
personnel can design appropriate training and development programs (Mirzanti, et al. 2017).
A needs assessment involves a systematic process that organizations apply when they want to
respond to available gaps and needs available between the current conditions as well as the
desirable conditions. Management must measure the discrepancy occurring between the
current conditions and what management seeks to achieve. Objective of this paper is four
fold. The first section explains the reason for undertaking a needs assessment. The second
section explains and justifies the method selected to conduct the needs assessment. The third
section conducts an evaluation of the needed assessment process in order to determine
whether training is necessary. The fourth section examines possible outcomes in case the
needs assessment is not properly planned or conducted.
Organisation
Overview of Atlassian Corporation
Atlassian Corporation Plc operates as an Australian Company with its headquarters at
Sydney. Currently, the company specializes in designing and selling of three groups of
products – for planning, tracking & support, for collaborating & chatting, and coding,
building & and shipping. For example, the first category of products includes Jira software,
Jira service desk, Jira Core, and Statuspace. The second category of products covers
confluence, Trello, Stride, and Hipchat. The third category of products includes the
Bitbucket, Sourcetree, and Bamboo.
Every organization has varying reasons forces management to initiate an assessment
of employee needs. Management can find an opportunity to update their employees

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concerning improvements in processes, rolling out of a new software or equipment, or trying
to respond to some of the changes that management have made to policies or laws. Just in the
same way, an organization might consider implementing software or making updates to
operational processes, management can only become successful if employees become
comfortable about the proposed changes. Therefore, training serves an important role only if
it manages to address the actual needs within the company. However, in the most cases,
training occurs as an afterthought activity. Management tend to consider it after employees
have completed a given project. When in reality, they should have considered it as an item in
the original plan. Irrespective of the size or the scope, developing of training program must
always form the first step in any needs assessment. The following five reasons explain why
management of Atlassian should undertake a needs assessment.
Importance of training program
The company management might have a perception that the training offered to
employees during the induction period was enough to give employees the needed skills.
However, the moment a trainer starts to pose some questions concerning the requirements;
this might help in uncovering a number of issues (Bulkley, et al. 2017). The training program
might therefore, change to ensure it meets the needs of the company. Any training needs
assessment ensures that managers ask and respond to a number of basic questions such as
who, why, when, how, and what. More importantly, human resource personnel at Atlassian
will get the change to respond to some of the questions such as who needs training, who will
train them, how will they be trained, what will be used to aid in training, what method is most
applicable, and among others.

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Participants
The last critical element in the evaluation and selection process would involve
individuals that will be considered to participate in the program. Management should go
ahead and identify key leaders, emerging leaders, and employees from different department
as a way of determining the right people to be part of the program (King and Eiser, 2016).
These are the kind of people that will play a role in supporting the entire goals and strategies
at Atlassian Company. Similar to the above three sections, the company management could
go ahead to respond to three questions;
a. Who is the right person to be part of the new program?
b. What are the needed major characteristics and constraints likely to the success of the
program?
c. What is the correct number of participants can the program accommodating?
Explanation of the cohort of who need to participate in the program
In one way or another, organizations tend to perform a training needs assessment even
before they embark on a leadership development program (Dean and Ripley, 2016). He
outlines that such assessments range from simple awareness about the leadership
development that leaders need to develop to extensive multi-faceted analysis that helps
identify the existing gaps that require development and try to define any additions to a
development process. a majority of organizations can derive some benefits when they come
up with the right and correct method to assess the current needs (Thomas, et al. 2018).
Without following this process, it would as well imply that management comes up with
guesswork concerning what training and programs that leaders require them to achieve better

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results in their responsibilities or become prepared to implement the next step during the
leadership pipeline.
Therefore, how does management know the company has accurate and complete
needs assessment? Whether the company has an external expert performing the needs
assessment or an internal team, the company will need to follow the following simple needs
assessment process (Murabit, 2012). Even though it is simple, it still covers all the important
details that explain how the management will go about it in order to determine if training
and/or development is necessary.
Step 1: begin from a bigger picture of an organization
Full background about the company plays a critical role when assessing the needs for
training among employees. It ensure that all concerned managers come up with a report that
has a much-needed context (Orakwue and Dorasamy, 2017). Furthermore, it also provided
specific recommendations about the culture of the company, its history, and objectives. For
example, management will start to think about what Atlassian Company has accomplished in
the past and future expected growth. It would be important for the company to understand
expected outcome and how they all link to an overall strategy. For example, the company
management should understand as to whether all goals relate to leader development, team
effectiveness, or performance.
The company could start from asking the question such as how we got where we are. Besides,
management will depend on the company vision for the program:
a. What are some of the things that the company need to achieve when the program gets
implemented?
b. How does Atlassian Company expect the relationship between the current results and
future outcomes?
c. What are some of the external factors does Atlassian Company need to consider.

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d. What are possible internal constraints such as timing or budgets that are likely to limit
the program during the implementation process?
Step 2: Gain insight about the current performance level
Understanding the above aspects about Atlassian Company will lay a better
foundation to start understanding about the current performance. At this level, management
will now need to start focusing on the program (Petrovic, 2009). Any right development
opportunity should consider performance improvements and learning objectives for both
employees and leaders. The learning objectives should also be accompanied with specific
people to participate in the program.
Management should consider levels of the current skills against the needs in order to
develop proper training program. The identified gaps that pose some comfortability to
employees or show the ability to implement certain skills will help bring out areas of
development (Pless and Maak, 2011). As indicated in assessment 1, I managed to identify the
need for Atlassian Company to align leadership development program with already identified
leadership skills. It is because of this that management could go ahead to design a custom
360-degree competency assessment. The efforts to create a competency assessment will help
measure the current awareness concerning behaviours of leaders working in different
departments (Sundheim, 2013). This should also be accompanied with other related program
content in order to assist leaders bring out their skills. For instance, conducting the needs
analysis will help management make decision concerning the needs to focus on to achieve
high level of leadership competencies and those of employees (Siegel, 2015).
Management will need to ask a number of questions. For instance, some of the questions
might include the following;

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a. What is the type of knowledge and skills that participants require for them to become
successful in offering high quality services, increased production, as well as
developing awareness.
b. What are some of the current gaps in skills and knowledge?
c. How will the company identify and measure actions and behaviours?
d. Does the company need any form of reinforcement in order to achieve a sustainable
development? If yes, what type of reinforcement will it be?
Step 4: Focus on evaluation
Management will need to consider this step as the best time to consider how to
evaluate the achievements of the program. Besides, this step should come after management
has had stronger understanding of Atlassian background, its culture, goals as well as strategy.
For the company to become successful and record positive returns on investment,
management should come up with measurable outcomes that relate to overall strategy.
According to the previous assessment, it is apparent that Atlassian Company needed to
develop employee as well as leadership development program that would help improve their
engagement and retention. This implies that before management comes up with a program, it
would be appropriate to identify correct measurable metrics during pre- and post-program
evaluation phase. Such a metrics will not just focus on reaction of employees
The Benefit of the program to The Participants
The performance of employees in any organization always has a direct impact on
employees. While some scholars have argued that leaders are born, some have maintained
that leaders are made. Assessment of the gaps at Atlassian revealed that its leaders are not
born or made. This is because a majority of them still lack the needed leadership skills, styles,
and behaviours. Consequently, a majority of employees have become unaware concerning

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how they could perform their jobs to increase customer satisfaction. Therefore, the reason for
conducting a needs assessment is to ensure that management identify appropriate leadership
skills, traits and styles (Tripathi and Kohli, 2017). The appropriate leadership style that might
assist the leaders includes participative (through consultative, consensus, and democratic) and
entrepreneurial.
Currently, Atlassian experiences a gap of offering quality services to customers.
Conducting needs assessment will ensure that employees learn and acquire new skills,
knowledge, and abilities that positions them to improve quality of services (Dean and Ripley,
2016). When it comes to creation of corporate training programs, human resource personnel
must always identify key employees that will undergo the training session. It is by doing this
that management in charge of training will customise content of training course to meet the
specification of the role or department (Gandossy and Verma, 2009). In order to benefit the
bottom line, management need to provide employees with proper skills they need to improve
their performance. This will have a positive impact to the company bottom line.
Starting from the project leader that identifies the training need, to a trainer who
creates and implements the program, and employees that participate in the same program,
everyone involved must spend quality time (Thomas, et al. 2018). The reason to conduct the
needs assessment is to ensure that management delivers high returns on money invested in
production process (Hinge, 2016). The assessment of the gap at the company revealed that
the company has a goal of using software to empower humanity. However, because of lack of
proper production, Atlassian still experiences challenges of satisfying customers.
Consequently, customers have had to switch to competitors (Waldman and Balven, 2015).
Therefore, the reason for the needs assessment is to make employees understand production
processes that would translate into proper production.

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Program Plan
Detailed Plan
COMMUNICA
TION
TRAINER/
KEYNOTE
SPEARKERS
TARGET
GROUP
FOCUS TIME VENUE
Seminar Dr Adam Fraser Human
resource
managers
Training
session for
human
resource
managers in
charge of
employee
motivation
1st – 18th
June 2018
Lancem
ore Hill
Conference Allan Pease (aka
Mr Body
Language)
supervisors Hold a
conference
for all
supervisors
from all the
departments
18th – 25th
June 2018
Grange
Bellinzo
na
Workshop Bettina Arndt Product
design
Hold
conference
with all
leaders in
charge of
product
design,
planning and
building
27th June
– 3rd July
2018
Grange
Macedo
n
Ranges
Presentations Peter Baines Sales and
marketing
Make
presentations
and
discussions
concerning
the best
methods of
pitching and
integrated
marketing
communicati
on
5th – 6th
July 2018
Hyde
Park
Forum
Confere
nce
Centre
workshop Phil Lee Human
resource
managers
Hold a joint
workshop for
all human
resource
leaders in
charge of
employees
10th – 14th
July 2018
Foothills
Confere
nce
Centre

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Program Objectives
i. Give leaders communication skills
When the leaders gain communication skills, this will go a long way in ensuring that
they also understand how to communicate to their employees. Any form of poor
communication between the leaders and employees in software development has been found
to be one cause of poor service delivery of production (Robbins and Judge, 2009). Therefore,
the objective of the training program is to ensure that the leaders understand most appropriate
methods of communicating to their employees. The program will give leaders communication
skills such as decision-making, democratic leadership, and consultation at a team level
(Jerome, 2013). For instance, the program seeks to empower all leaders in charge of software
development, sells department, and marketing the skills to communicate and bring everyone
in change.
ii. Give leaders coaching skills
While leaders at the company have been found not to understand the best way to
coach and give directions to their employees, the objective of the training program is to
ensure that such leaders acquire coaching skills (Andersson, Jackson and Russell, 2013).
Even though some leaders at the company might find that coaching is easy, some leaders still
have trouble of directing their employees in the right direction (Gregory, Harris, Armenakis
and Shook, 2009). Most importantly, the current program seeks to give leaders coaching
skills such as showing empathy, remaining curious, recognizing the strengths of others,
taking in what they hear, reflecting with curiosity, and reflecting with accuracy.
iii. Make leaders become better motivators