Greene King Case Study | Leadership Development Programme

The Brief

Transitioning to a values-based, high performance organisation is a key part of Greene King PLC’s Strategic Business Plan. The Executive Board recognised that to deliver this strategic vision, they needed to engage and empower their Senior Leaders to deliver superior results at a PLC, Divisional and Functional level. With this in mind, Greene King appointed NKD to create a Leadership Development programme for the top 50 leaders across their organisation. The programme needed to challenge traditional thinking and the prevailing leadership approaches amongst this group and redress the ‘underinvestment’ in their Leadership Development over the past 10 years. It also needed to create ‘One Team’ of Senior Leaders who clearly understood their PLC accountabilities and began to take responsibility for PLC performance as well as local business results. Essentially, Greene King were looking to build trust and a sense of ‘community’ at the top of the organisation by creating greater collaboration and connection between the business divisions and across this group of key leaders.

The Solution

Discovery

In addition to our normal Discovery activities we were also asked to do some specific work with the Executive team to ensure the programme had their full buy in from the get go! This discrete but key element of the Discovery phase involved an initial 1 ½ day workshop and two ½ day follow-up sessions, designed to engage the Executive team with the Leadership Development programme and involve them in its overall scope and design.
 

Building The Leadership Framework

Working with a specially selected ‘User Group’ from the Leadership team, and taking input and advice from the Executive Team, we built a set of Leadership criteria incorporating the Greene King values. Using this set of criteria we built the Advanced Leadership Development programme detailing recommended content, module length and sequencing. This is now the basis of all Leadership Development at Greene King for the Senior Leadership team.
 

Developing The Core Programme Content

To kick start the Advanced Leadership Development programme, we designed a 3-day values-based leadership workshop ‘Leading the Way’ for the top 50 leaders. The workshops involved a bespoke 360° tool designed to measure performance against the newly created leadership criteria, discovery learning activities and a series of case study driven exercises on 21st Century leadership. Essentially these highly ‘experiential’ workshops provided leaders with the space and opportunity to explore their personal style and impact, understand the key concepts of values-based leadership and modern leadership, whilst discovering their own strengths and areas to develop.

In addition to these workshops, we have developed four additional mechanisms to keep the development going over the longer term, these include:

› Learning Workshops
These 1 and 2-day events have been designed to fast track learning in specific areas of leadership that are missing in this audience’s skills set and include:
- Commercial Management
- Change Management
- Integrating Acquisitions

› Masterclasses
These 3-hour facilitated sessions have been designed to ‘refresh’ and enhance existing leadership skills and knowledge. Topics covered are:
- Feedback & Coaching
- Creating High Performance Teams
- Influencing for Success

› Coaching & Mentoring
These sessions have been set up for key leaders to fast track their performance in specific development areas

› Business Breakthrough projects
These projects have been suggested for teams to work on and resolve real-life business issues whilst practising their new leadership behaviours and approaches. These projects will run over a 3-month period and be sponsored by a member of the Executive team. They follow a clearly defined approach that guarantees maximum business improvements as well as enhanced personal development for the leaders involved.

Results

The feedback from the workshops has been exceptional from both the delegates’ and the Board’s perspectives. Greene King is now working with NKD on the next phase of the Advanced Leadership Development programme.

Additionally, NKD have been commissioned to do further coaching work with the Board to help them coach their managers in sustaining the results the workshops have helped to create.