designing and delivering a bespoke retail leadership program: ‘When you trust the people around you, you get more done’
The challenge:
Our client’s newly formed operating board were tasked with designing and implementing a new strategy. This strategy required an equally focused team to make it happen. Find out how we deliver bespoke leadership development programmes that can turn ‘a disparate group of individuals into a team’.
We were asked to design and deliver a leadership programme that would enable the team to do these key things:
Create a common purpose and intent
Deepen understanding of personal styles and relationships within the group
Drive commonality in ways of working and enable leaders to step-up
Cascade the approach throughout the business
The results:
In the words of our client, we helped ‘turn a disparate group of individuals into a team’ – using a common language and ways of working to enable more focus, collaboration and efficiency. The result: greatly enhanced decision-making, ambition and levels of trust. As one participant said, ‘when you trust the people around you, you get more done.’
How we got there:
We designed a bespoke programme structured around our High Performance Team model. This was about kick starting new ways of working – setting the climate for a shift in culture. We brought a mix of tools, approaches and working sessions to explore practical and behavioural change.
Across the course of a year, 3 offsite sessions of a couple of days with space in between to give the team time to explore new techniques and deepen their skills. We also ran 1:1 psychometrics and feedback sessions to explore individual strengths, opportunities, and leadership patterns. Crucially, the whole leadership programme was set within the context of the challenges the team were facing, in real-time. Problems discussed in the sessions were problems the team faced outside of the sessions, too.
We kick-started the sessions by defining the team’s performance challenge, and examining how work flowed through the organisation. Practical tools included meeting management, meeting behavioural analysis, decision-making and role accountability. We also developed coaching and feedback skills that would help the leaders reap positive outcomes from difficult conversations and the team to develop leadership commitments, aligned to their new vision.
The sessions were designed to take people out of their normal jobs and immerse them into a different way of thinking through perspective-shifting conversations. Each session was designed to build on the prior, thereby deepening conversations, personal reflections and connections.
The session with the most profound personal impact was our lifelines exercise, exploring how previous life experiences have shaped each person into the leaders they are today. For many this was pivotal, giving deep insight into themselves and their colleagues.
To find out more please get in touch / +44 (0) 20 7298 7878
