The HR World speaks to industry leaders about their careers and life – what advice would they pass on and what wisdom brought them to where they are now.
BPO and customer experience solution company ArvatoConnect works with organsiations to help them deliver outcomes for customers through technology and human-centre interactions. Here, Chief People Officer, Sally Neale discusses the creation and impact of their CEO Club initiative.
Everyone in your organisation deserves to access the learning and development they need to progress.
We created the The CEO Club to offer this support for anyone in the business who wanted to grow and develop in their role and in the business. CEO stands for coaching, empowerment and opportunity.
We created it for people who wanted to grow or develop in whatever way was good for them. Sometimes that means increasing their confidence, sometimes it means offering management or leadership skills. It’s open to anyone in the organisation but we were particularly thinking about our frontline workers who could feel they were overlooked or didn’t access our usual programmes.
The CEO Club offers a 12 month programme for 12 individuals. We match each of them with a senior manager to mentor them throughout the programme so the whole thing is personalised from the start.
While this programme certainly helped our people internally it also had to have an impact externally for them. I have a passion that we should be developing our peoples for their next job as well as the one they have so the programme is quite flexible and bespoke, keying into the kind of skills and interests they each have.
Learning and development can give anyone company knowledge and skills to do better.
The CEO Club often gives those taking part more of an insight into some of the commercial decisions we have to take as a business.
They understand more about our business strategy and the brand. In one session we encourage them to pitch their own ideas for the business – a sort of Dragon’s Den exercise. In another I facilitate a mock board room where they receive a particular scenario to discuss and work through – this might be something like can we give our people a pay increase to reflect the cost of living. This also helps them to understand the social value agenda of the business, how we can improve the lives of our employees.
You have to be clear about what you want to get from your L&D initiative.
It’s important to be open about what you’re trying to achieve from an initiative like this. Once we’d identified the gap in L&D provision that we wanted to address – frontline workers and entry level customer service agents – we could be quite bold about what we wanted to do. We were able to state clearly why we wanted to do this programme and how it would work. The idea was also to help retention – if people can’t see a journey to go on within the business or what’s next for them they’ll be less likely to stay. Also by designing it as we did we were able to say to the individuals this is about what you want to get out of it. We’ll give you stepping stones that will help move you forward but you need to determine what you’ll get from it.
That’s also why we made it self-nominating. We do get some people nominated by their managers but we prefer it when people say they want to do it themselves.
A good initiative should be expanded, but don’t lose sight of what’s important.
There’s some real benefits to expanding the CEO Club and allowing more individuals on the programme. However we want to make sure it retains its impact and value. Everyone who has been on the programme in the last three years have given it five out of five stars and I worry if we had too many people on the programme at one time that impact could be compromised. It’s a very intense experience and the mentors and other people delivering the sessions have to be able to work effectively in a group setting as well as giving each participant the attention and support they want.
We have other programmes – such as Elevate and Step Up – which help to develop management skills and enable people to achieve more so we might look at developing those initiatives, perhaps taking some of the learning points we’ve had from the CEO Club and using them in those initiatives too.
The singer Prince was quoted as saying “a strong spirit transcends rules” and I like to think about The CEO Club in that context – it’s about creating leaders who have the confidence to challenge the everyday norms in a responsible way and not just follow the play book. It’s important that any playbook is updated and rewritten and we need new people to bring us fresh and new ideas to make that happen.
