Case Study
Developing leadership in a large corporate sales team
Background
Against a backdrop of organisational change, we were approached to look at leadership development for the senior management team. Although well established, the team wanted to develop a stronger leadership culture to ensure the organisational change programme was successful and new stretching targets were achieved.
We discovered a comfortable environment where leaders operated individually with very little formal or informal feedback process. There was a general sense that everyone needed to be more honest when talking about performance, particularly with under performers within their teams.
Action
The following objectives were agreed for a team event:
- To establish strong ‘Support and Challenge’ principles within the team
- To establish the principles and benefits of giving quality feedback
- To give an opportunity to practise giving and receiving quality feedback
- To understand how we react to change and how to deal with this
The event was delivered to 3 groups of 12 and incorporated:
- An introduction to understanding how to Support and Challenge each other
- The principles of how to give and receive feedback using a structured approach
- Reactions to feedback and change, understanding how we react and how we support and challenge each other through the stages of change
- A team activity linked to current themes within the business. This was based around how to share a bonus for a team, which particularly linked into managing varied levels of performance
- A full debrief within a group situation to bring out the key learning points, and then individual feedback to each other on behaviours and impact
- Next steps and commitments to each other going forward
Outcome
This event was subsequently cascaded to the next management level driving the change through the organisation. In addition, this was followed with 1:1 coaching and feedback sessions with a number of key people within the senior leadership team. This has become second nature, increasing performance levels, which in turn has significantly raised the sales productivity within the area.
