Insight has been working with Capital & Regional to support their employee development since 2016. Capital & Regional, a specialist retail property investment company, identified the need for a management development programme that supported their new and experienced managers through a number of business challenges.
As part of a broader management development programme Insight designed a suite of development workshops tailored to support managers and employees at different levels of the organisation. Key objectives when designing these workshops were:
- To design and deliver practical workshops that were accessible to a wide range of staff across C&R
- To tailor workshops to specific teams, facing particular circumstances or challenges
- To support the introduction of values, expectations and behaviours across the organisation
- To provide development for both managers and non-managers
- To support participants to implement learning back in the workplace
- To complement and support the development of senior leaders and to provide a consistent ‘language’ across the organisation.
- To support C&R through a period of organisational change.
The proposed workshops were designed to support three groups of staff – Workshops that were applicable to anybody within the organisation and that focused on personal development, sessions that supported managers and that focused on delivery through others and workshops that supported team development and that focused on the challenges facing particular teams
Workshops Included:
- Communication Skills – how to communicate effectively and engage others with our message
- Personal Effectiveness – prioritising and managing our time effectively
- Problem Solving and being Innovative – encouraging our own creativity and understanding what makes a ‘good idea’
- Great Customer Focus – developing skills around C&R’s approach to customer experience
- Applying Emotional Intelligence – understanding EI and how to improve our own approaches
- Coaching and Mentoring Skills – Applying coaching and mentoring skills of rapport building, active listening, powerful questioning
- Influencing Effectively – how to get the most from interpersonal interactions, to understand who we need to influence and how to have the impact we desire
Delivery Formats
The majority of workshops were delivered as one-day ‘real life’, face to face sessions delivered by an experienced Insight Development Consultant. In order to maximise accessibility to the learning, we also utilised a ‘blended learning’ approach using video, webinars and supported by reading and other online resources.
Embedding the Learning
One of the challenges of delivering any learning or development intervention is of ensuring the effective transfer of learning into the workplace – how do you ensure that the development will have a positive impact on the way in which an individual leads or behaves.
To support this, we aligned the workshops to Capital & Regional’s values and competencies so a common language was utilised that supported managers’ day-to-day interactions. We ensured that the workshops introduced a number of practical tools to support the delivery of actions and made clear links between Capital & Regional’s business objectives and how managers’ behaviour could drive effective performance. All workshops concluded with managers completing action plans to ensure they understood the link between the theoretical development models and tools covered in the workshop and how that translated into deliverable actions.
We also offered opportunities for post-workshop support through various approaches to suit the team/individual:
- Work-based learning activities
- Building a learning support network
- Coaching / tutorial support
- Learning logs and journals
- Online support
We sought post-workshop feedback from all participants and received very positive comments such as:
Excellent day – with good tips on how to implement learning effectively.
Fantastic delivery, thoroughly enjoyed the course.
Can be used in a variety of everyday situations.
I will use some of the skills in a meeting I am having with my team next week.
Line managers were encouraged to provide feedback on the elements that had the greatest impact on changing behaviour and approach in the workplace. We utilised this feedback to inform our design of subsequent development programmes and to ensure that workshops remain relevant to the live challenges facing Capital & Regional managers.