Case Study for Leadership Development

Leadership in action

A significant amount of change, challenging targets with a flatter management structure made a compelling case for a step change in my teams' performance.  The previous three years had seen rapid change and a re-focus on improving customer service and day to day efficiencies.

My team is responsible for the entire breakdown service, including call centres and patrols. However I didn't believe there was true alignment within the team and we weren't spending enough time thinking about how effective we were at working together. We needed more cohesion on shared goals - otherwise we were at risk of undoing some of the good that we had achieved. All this convinced me we required external support.

This came in the form of HR & Training Solutions Ltd who we brought in to facilitate a Leadership team development programme.

They applied a fast track programme to improve leadership team capability  bringing together key leadership disciplines to run our business more effectively and improve results.

For me the strength in our programme as opposed to other options lay in the fact our development was directly linked to achieving our business plans and results. We also included monthly development reviews to ensure leadership team alignment, accountability and progress on embedding leadership team disciplines.

The programme gave us time to reflect as a team and create a road map for achieving our strategy and goals over the coming year, commitments for performance improvement and a shared understanding of key leadership principles that we each needed to adopt.

Overall the biggest benefit of the programme has been an increased focus on Leadership team planning and our programme was facilitated to accommodate  the dynamic nature of our business.

In an operational team, planning can get a bit neglected because you're so busy with the day job. However the our programme provided clarity around what we had to deliver as well as improved the team's interaction with each other and important Leadership discplines.  It also gave us greater foresight and judgement which continues to positively influence our business results.

I believe this work contributed directly to us being classed as the best for service by Which? but most important, objective setting and delivering on these has now become part of our culture - which was the whole point of our programme.