We recently celebrated a brilliant cultural change journey with new client Leadec that focused on evolving a directive management style culture to one driven by leadership.
Leadec is a global service specialist that supports its manufacturing industry customers with planning, automating and operating their factories and buildings.
The organisation surveys its employees annually on company culture. The 2022 cultural poll identified themes to feed into a change journey and opportunities to create a culture with leadership at its core. The focus of this would be to empower managers to become leaders and to create a shift from working in siloes to building strong cross-functional relationships.
For this to happen, cohorts needed to be cross-functional and delegates needed opportunities to share and celebrate between workshop sessions, with a view to keeping everyone heading in the same direction.
Leading Edge designed and facilitated a cultural change journey for 50 managers and the senior leadership team (across four cohorts), with development activities underpinned by our points of view on change and leadership. Cohorts took part in four face-to-face sessions from September 2022 to April 2023.
Cross-functional cohorts were made up of managers with differing seniority and from many business areas and locations. Each cohort included one or two senior managers, who joined the journey to recognise the importance of this cultural change.
In the first session, Leading Edge Team Coaches introduced the change equation, exploring with cohorts how organisations and people change, and gaining clarity as a group on the need for this change.
Moving on to session two and the cohorts worked to generate six key cultural behaviours that would inform the rest of the programme: collaborative, trust, supportive, positive, flexible and innovative.
Sessions two to four covered leadership, bringing to life what good leadership looks like at Leadec, understanding strengths, developing self-awareness as a leader, and enhancing the leadership skills required for success.
Between sessions, Leading Edge facilitated Action Learning Sets, bringing together two or three people from each cohort virtually to learn, share and celebrate. These regular check-ins helped to maintain momentum, keep the onus on the cohort and feed into the design of future sessions.
By kicking off each session with a celebration of the previous session’s outcomes and a summary from a representative from the Action Learning Sets, collectively we kept everyone heading in the same direction and towards the same desired outcome.
Leading Edge have provided invaluable support to our cultural change programme. We have benefited from a broad range of Team Coaches, each with a different character and each bringing different skills and perspectives to our business. The Team Coaches worked and grew with us, reacting flexibly to guide us during the start of our transformational journey.
The Leading Edge team are incredibly likeable and engaging, being able to gently bring our colleagues out of their shells and enable them to get the most out of the sessions and reach their potential.
Importantly, the Leading Edge Team Coaches were able to deploy creative and engaging techniques when coaching and guiding the team, giving us confidence to put new skills into practice outside of the training room. Indeed, the skills we have recently learnt, particularly in respect of coaching and empowerment, are already being utilised practically during our day-to-day activities.
With the support of the Leading Edge Team Coaches, we have been able to self-define our company’s cultural values and, importantly, identify the behaviours that support these values. We are now in the process of building these values and behaviours into all that we do – these are not simply words on a piece of paper; we are bringing these to life, so that they truly define our company culture.
Since completing the first phase of our journey with Leading Edge, we can demonstrably see and feel a positive change to our organisational culture – and this would not have been possible without their outstanding support, collaboration and professionalism.
We are already looking forward to phase two!
”- Lucy Roger, HR Director, Leadec
