Background and objectives
The West Group are specialists in the design, manufacture and supply of fluid control solutions. They have grown substantially from a small family run business, through a focus on innovation and delivering to the highest quality standards
To support continued growth both domestically and internationally they recognised they needed to invest in their leadership and management teams
Their proactive People Consultant, Tracy Castle, knew that there was an opportunity to think about the culture they desired to create for the future, as part of their Employee Value Proposition, as well as developing their management and leadership capability
Our solution
We worked closely with Tracy to design a programme, which included 4 phases
- working with the SLT and the rest of the organisation to develop a set of values to help guide all behaviour, interaction and decision making – and have a clear focus on workplace culture
- working with the Senior leadership team to develop their own team working
- designing a tailored leadership programme for the SLT
- designing a tailored management development programme for the managers reporting to the SLT
Creating the values
Our facilitator ran an initial workshop with the SLT to identify key principles that could become the values. These were then taken out to the management team and all employees for comment and suggestion
The outcome has been a set of values under the tag line Together We Grow – linking to TWG (The West Group) with fantastic visuals to support their roll out
Working with the SLT
Creating a high performing senior leadership team doesn’t happen by accident and the directors at TWG embraced the opportunity to look at their own team working and how it could be improved
We used our Ten Traits of a High Performing Team questionnaire as a starting point to identify strengths to build on and areas for development
Tailored Leadership and management development programmes
- These 2 programmes were run in parallel with each other so that the commitment from the SLT was visible to all other managers and a consistent leadership approach was created at all levels
- Both programmes
- were Institute of Leadership accredited – adding recognition and credibility for everyone participating
- incorporated Clarity 4D self-awareness tool to help raise awareness around different styles and contributions and help everyone adapt their style to get the best outcomes
- had the values woven through each module to help with practical ways to use them
- included a final module where everyone (from the CEO to new managers!) had a chance to practise key skills covered in the programme with an actor playing the team member
Outcomes
- 12 months on, the SLT repeated their Ten Traits of a High Performing Team questionnaire – which showed a big shift in all areas with 6 of the 10 categories rated as agree or strongly agree by all team members
- Clarity 4D has been rolled out to all team members to provide a common language for teams to discuss different approaches and strengths, understand and harness the different contribution each team member makes and improve communication and interaction across the business.
- The values are embedded in key touch points – the business strategy, one to ones, recruitment, team meetings and reviews – with some great visual reminders such as lanyards and images painted on walls in the offices
Tracy commented “We gained so much more from this programme than we anticipated. What started as a training needs analysis for a bespoke leadership programme, resulted in two interwoven programmes, tailored superbly to meet the needs of our SLT and Management Team populations. We involved the whole Company in creating new company values and underpinning behaviours, which have been fundamental in bringing our company strategy to life and empowering our people. The return on the investment of both time (to attend) and budget has never been in doubt and it has been refreshing to work with a company who recognise the broader business context”.