Wickland Westcott

The Great Co-operative Leadership Model

The Co-operative Group is a unique business democratically run by members to meet their common needs and aspirations. Their range of activities include Food, Travel, Banking, Insurance, Pharmacy, Funeralcare, Legal Services and Electrical, and the businesses are underpinned by clear values and an emphasis upon ethics and sustainability.

Sustaining the Co-operative Group as a vibrant, thriving enterprise requires leaders with vision, passion and a fundamental understanding of their diverse markets. A recent initiative has involved benchmarking and developing the succession pool that sits beneath the Executive Team in order to ensure the business has the leadership talent to meet the demands of the future.

What does great leadership look like?

The first step was to identify the essential behaviours that demonstrate effective leadership within the Group, critically not just for today but also for tomorrow's organisation. Talent consultancy Wickland Westcott was retained to help with this work, and their psychologists undertook one-to-one interviews with all the Executive team, and other key stakeholders within the businesses. The result was the creation of The Great Co-operative Leadership Model, which was signed-off by the CEO and became the bedrock of the project moving forward.

How do we measure up?

The next step was to measure the succession pool against this framework, but first a detailed communications programme was launched. Participants were aware of the project already, indeed a sample of them had been intentionally included in the development of the leadership model to optimise its relevance and face-validity. Each participant received a briefing pack about the process, along with a face-to-face meeting with the Wickland Westcott Consultant and a member of the Group HR Team. This ensured that the initiative was properly positioned and that any participant questions could be answered. In advance of the assessment session, participants completed pre-work which consisted of an on-line personality questionnaire and a self-assessment questionnaire.

The components of the assessment day were designed by Wickland Westcott to exactly match the dimensions in The Great Co-operative Leadership Model, and consisted of a numerical critical reasoning test, a simulation case-study exercise, and a 2-hour interview with the psychologist. The case-study exercise was purpose-built to reflect the challenges facing future leaders in the Group. After the assessment day, references were taken on each participant to provide a further source of data. In summary, a highly robust and challenging process was undertaken.

Within two weeks of the assessment session, a detailed report was produced capturing the participant's strengths, development areas, aspirations, and marketplace benchmark. These outputs were then shared at a 1 ½ hour face-to-face feedback meeting - a constructive session where participants could reflect upon the data and genuinely commit to relevant development activity. As a participant they could challenge points in the report that they didn't understand or agree with, and in turn they were challenged by the psychologist to really confront and internalise relevant feedback. Psychologist credibility was vital here, and Wickland Westcott fielded a team with exceptional commercial experience and understanding.

Following the feedback session, each participant attended a further meeting with their manager and a member of the Group HR Team to agree specific development activities and create a PDP. Line manager involvement in downstream development activity is the biggest factor in driving return-on-investment from interventions of this sort, so this phase was critical.

Have we got the talent?

As well as providing a stimulating individual experience for each participant, The Executive Team wanted an overall appraisal of the quality of the talent in the succession pool, and therefore Wickland Westcott prepared an analysis detailing the profile of this group. This was presented to the CEO and his team, and along with the rest of the project, was very well received.

The bottom line

What benefits did the Co-operative Group get from this investment?

1. A detailed understanding of their senior talent, enabling informed decisions to be taken regarding promotion, placement and career development.
2. An enhanced Succession plan for the Executive team
3. Knowledge and confidence about how their people stack up against the wider marketplace.
4. Understanding of the consequences of existing career management processes (eg. a leader who spends 20 years in a single business will have depth but not breadth).
5. A triggering of development activity amongst the succession pool. Participants are role-modelling personal development to lower levels in the organisation, and the project has also led the Executive to think more carefully about their own development.
6. A language through which people can talk about leadership, facilitating more frequent, open and honest feedback between senior peers.

"Wickland Westcott invested time and effort to truly understand our leadership DNA and then provided us with a sensitive understanding of our talent pipeline. Their consultancy credibility, combined with deep commercial and psychological insights, in conjunction with their commitment to working in partnership, has helped build a solid succession platform that will underpin the Co-operative into the future."

Peter Marks, Chief Executive, The Co-operative Group.