Leadership has been a hot topic in many circles of late. With L&D professionals spoilt for choice in a crowded training market, Karalyn Brown looks at how important it is to pay attention to the basics in leadership training, working with and within the culture and creating learning that sticks
Leadership has been a hot topic in many circles of late. With L&D professionals spoilt for choice in a crowded training market, Karalyn Brown looks at how important it is to pay attention to the basics in leadership training, working with and within the culture and creating learning that sticks
Good leaders are responsible for many things within their organisations – productivity, morale, vision, commitment and employee engagement – just to name a few. Some of these benefits of leadership are hard to quantify, but can have a significant impact upon the bottom line.
Leadership training has now moved far beyond the classroom, to executive retreats, one-on-one coaching, accessing the ‘deep smarts’, shadowing the boss, mentoring and NASA based simulations. But while there’s beauty in choice, most L&D professionals will need to seek ways to move the new training beyond the faddish.
Whatever the forum, the fundamentals are still important: creating and using a culture that supports the learning and ‘stickiness’ in training. A key priority is to target the training to a specific business need in order to ensure the training dollar is well spent, down to its last cent.
Frucor pushes leadership to new frontiers
Frucor Beverages employs about 640 staff across its Australian and New Zealand offices. It produces a number of beverages, from fruit juices to energy and soft drinks. The company has a strong values-based culture, and leadership plays a key role in supporting the culture. “We develop from within, we have lots of people promoted internally and it’s important to show staff we are investing in them and to develop their leadership and management skills,” says Frucor’s human resources director, Lisa Reeves.
Over the last three years, Frucor has run ‘Frontiers’– a two-part leadership training program to develop a young management team through a period of huge company growth. Frucor ran ‘Frontiers One’ for two days offsite. Leaders participated in practical exercises to understand what leadership requires and to practice the skills needed on the job. The training was run offsite to “focus just on leadership”, Reeves says.
“We divided leaders into four groups according to their employment level. Junior managers were pilots, mid level managers were trackers, senior managers were navigators and executives were strategists,” she says. “We branded the program to get people on board and excited.”
To design training that targeted specific operational needs, Frucor partnered with an external provider who worked closely with the business to identify the leadership competencies required at different management levels. They designed training around each competency, increasing its complexity for each management level.
In order to ensure the leadership training stuck, Reeves says participants were given pre-work with just enough detail to tell them what to expect and reassure them. After the sessions each leader sat down with their manager to create individual plans for their ongoing development.
‘Frontiers Two’, which was also run offsite, targeted each leader’s personal development using 360 degree assessment and emotional intelligence to “help leaders see how others perceive them and how they see themselves”, Reeves says. “They then understand what they need to work on and how to leverage their strengths.”Participants undertook exercises such as high ropes to “understand, challenge and push themselves”.
As any personal feedback can be confronting, Reeves used a psychologist to administer the tests and manage the feedback. To create a safe learning environment, no physical exercise was compulsory, she says.
Follow up is important to realise the full benefits of such sessions. Frucor’s HR and management team provided three-way feedback covering “what worked, what didn’t work and what to leverage. We had an HR representative keep the discussion on track and focused on development, to ensure it wasn’t just tactical,” Reeves says.
Each new manager in Frucor now undergoes ‘Frontiers Three’– a combination of the first and second programs with some ‘just in time’ training.
So what type of culture ensures the success of such investment? “Our MD is very supportive of leadership development,” says Reeves. “The program grew out of our values we defined a number of years ago. We run workshops on values and use these in the recruitment process, to make sure we are hiring people who will fit our culture.”
While Reeves acknowledges it is difficult to link training to a specific business objective, she says the feedback has been positive: “Individuals see the company investing in them.” Reeves has personally witnessed changes in behaviour from the second program. She recounts a comment from an employee: “I didn’t understand fully myself and my weaknesses, but now I am really focusing on changing what and how I do.”
A mongrel dog called Spirit
Stanley Works is a global supplier of tools and hardware products for home improvement, consumer, industrial and professional use. In Australia, the company has recently undergone significant organisational change, including relocation, setting up a new distribution centre and an executive team which has been together less than two-and-a-half years. As a result, the company was looking for leadership to define and embody a new cultural change.
“We had done lots of good things profit-wise, but not caught up culturally. We needed to succeed through our people,” says Sonia Goodwin, human resources manager. The challenge was to find something that moved beyond the traditional team building and have people “personally own values … not words on walls”.
The leadership went offsite for a series of simulated exercises, in which Goodwin says the company tested and tried some new themes. The executives found themselves taking part in exercises best described as Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Monty Python. “At one stage they were blindfolded in a paddock pulling on a rope to move them between A and B,” she says.
Yes, it sounds faddish or just like team building, but Goodwin says there were guidelines to follow and the exercises were deliberately designed to reflect, but look nothing like a workplace scenario. “We knew what we had to do and if we failed and applied the same processes, we would fail in real life. The exercises don’t teach skills, but simulate over and over again.” The leaders accelerated the learning by letting things get more out of control and exaggerated the situation to stimulate reflection, she adds.
And the result? “A buzz about the business” and a “mongrel dog called ‘Spirit’”, Goodwin says. ‘Spirit’ represents a new set of values that reflect Stanley Works, such as safety, passion, integrity, respect, innovation and teamwork. Stanley Works opted for a mongrel dog over a pedigree, as Goodwin says a mongrel is unique, home grown and “represents Stanley Works and our way of working”.
To reinforce the message Stanley Works now uses the values of Spirit to “hire around culture”, Goodwin says.
So what sold the management team on the idea of team results? Partly Goodwin’s credibility, understanding of the business, a belief that the initiative would work and the fact Stanley Tool’s leaders had identified where the company needed to go. “They needed to be reassured of outcome,” she says.
