A large housing & property group

Learning and Development

Working with the top team of one of the UK’s largest, and arguably most admired, housing and property groups, it became apparent that the on-going development of staff would become an important directive if they were to maintain this position.

Whilst there had been a training plan in place, it was fragmented and largely operational. Little focus had been given to succession planning or leadership and management development; Wellbeing Works was commissioned to assist in addressing this and work on staff development issues.

Approach

Our first task was to establish the impact of the strategic plan for growth and the need for skilled leaders and managers. This revealed a number of gaps.

Wellbeing Works then assessed the top 40 managers and identified their leadership/managerial potential skill levels using Chally, the international skills potential assessment tool. We then held discussions with each of the team on an individual basis for feedback. This allowed us to identify those who had ambitions to progress and precisely “who needed what”.

Working with the top team, Wellbeing Works then identified three informal groups of talent:

• those whom the organisation believed had the potential to progress to very senior roles
• those who had the potential to develop to a high level in their existing role
• those who had the ability to progress to middle level roles in 3-5 years’ time

We also identified the need for an additional number of staff from the results of the analysis.

Outcome

From this exercise Wellbeing Works was able to organise a combination of bespoke development for employees in the first groups, including:

• 1:1 coaching
• attendance at short programmes at major institutions (e.g. INSEAD, the graduate business school)
• exposure to specific tasks and projects

From the other two groups, an in-house programme for managers with potential was provided. For this programme we delivered psychometric testing and feedback to each individual, followed by a series of workshops covering; personal effectiveness, psychologically safe and responsible managers, building effective teams, project management skills, personal resilience, delegating and communicating effectively and influencing for success.

The housing and property group continues to enjoy its pre-eminent position and employee succession has been managed in a professional and sustained way.