this is the
difference maker
igniting authentic leadership in retail through curiosity, care and courage
the challenge
Our client was in the midst of a business transformation programme which we’d designed and were helping them deliver. It became clear that for a real change in performance and behaviour to happen, leaders needed to think and act differently. There was a strong desire to shift from a command-control style to one in which leaders were still focused on results but were working in a more collaborative way to get the best from their teams.
We were asked to design a leadership approach that would work at all levels and in all functions across the organisation.
the results
This work was part of a business-wide transformation programme which as a whole has delivered an RoI of 29:1. The feedback on our workshop series was powerfully positive, typified by such comments as
“this is the difference maker”
At the heart of our approach was the concept of curiosity, courage and care, words which have made it into our own lexicon. From concept to design and through to implementation, this was a huge culture shift: it needed to be role-modelled from the top down for staff to believe it was OK to act differently.
how we got there
As we began this work, the concept of authenticity was starting to filter into the organisation – the idea of bringing your whole self to work rather than hiding parts of yourself behind a leadership façade. As we listened to people across the organisation, the desire for leaders to ‘be real’ came across loud and clear. We held this as our guiding principle as we developed the framework.
We worked with a core team of nine (seven clients, two of us), following a workshop approach which drew on organisation-wide ‘crowdsourcing’ sessions – gathering feedback from over 2,000 employees in different states, functions and hierarchies. This was an approach never before used by our client and answered the call for a more collaborative culture.
After creating the leadership framework, we designed pilot workshops for the field and support centre, testing different ways of ‘activating’ authentic leadership. Common to all the pilots was the use of storytelling to bring the different aspects of the framework to life.
We found that where we were already working with staff, delivering performance improvements in stores, there was greater readiness to behave in a different way. So once we’d analysed the feedback and looked at the most practical way to introduce a new leadership way of thinking and acting, we created a series of interlinked workshops that could be delivered as part of the operational excellence culture change programme that was being rolled out across the US.
