Bonfire Night is over, Home Alone is back on the telly and we're all waiting for the 2018 John Lewis Christmas ad to drop. 2018 must be drawing to an end.
Like most organisations, our focus remains sharply on our year-end business goals. Pressure increases for everyone including our leaders who must continue to inspire, engage and drive their teams towards individual, team and company success. At the same time, we are already building our business plans for 2019. Nailing down our new goals and strategies to inspire our people at our annual Christmas Conference, which is just around the corner. It’s a big ask, we know, especially when the fuel tank feels like we are running on fumes. So, how do we keep our leaders topped up with the fuel they need to accelerate to the finish line and keep going into 2019’s race? We put a big glug of learning and development in the tank in the form our Leadership Academy.
Last week, we took 30 of our emerging and growing leaders off-site to kick off the second phase of the Leadership Academy. Our mission is to do ideas, relationships and results better than anyone else and create a culture which gives all of our people a little bit of career gold. The role of our leaders in enabling this is absolutely crucial which is why we’ve invested in their career development at this time of year.
Our journey to build a top-performing culture started with the work we did with Jane Sparrow from The Culture Builders in 2015. Jane introduced us to her model, the leader as a culture builder. With her permission we adopted the five roles as our leadership framework and created our own bespoke content to enable each of our leaders to excel in all five roles.
In her book, The Culture Builders, Jane says: "All five roles are made, not born in people, and can be attained by focus, effort and determination. Like many areas of leadership theory, the first step is always going to be recognition of what the situation requires and understanding how you personally get there."
"The CCUK leadership team are serious about their culture and the adoption of our five roles ‘Leader as Culture Builder’ in their development work is testament to that. From working directly with them back in 2015 and staying involved with their journey since then, I feel they should be hugely proud of the progress they have made by putting people and culture at the heart of the business. It's very obvious how the team uses the strength of all five roles to develop, grow and lead their teams in a culture of best performance."
Over a series of workshops and personal coaching sessions, the We Do Leaders programme is challenging and thought-provoking. We encourage our people to make changes to evolve their leadership impact and style to achieve measurable results with their team's engagement and performance. With this learning, there is strong support and resources to retain and inspire our leaders to do the best work of their career and become the kind of leader they would follow.