#NCSW Effective Strategy and Leadership
06 October 2022
We are proud to be supporting National Customer Service Week 2022.
Today focuses on Effective Strategy and Leadership and we spoke to Emma McAvinchey-Roberts about how leaders should set their teams up for success
At Carpenters Group, our programme of management development really reflects our strategy of having effective leadership in place at all levels. All of our managers and indeed our people play a vital role in translating our organisational strategy, vision and values into action and in doing so, ensuring our people are managed well and deliver outstanding internal and external customer service.
One of the main objectives of our management development programme was very simple; we wanted to bring our people together again, particularly after the past few years. Hybrid working has many benefits, but the reality is nothing is better than coming together in person, having real life conversations and face-to-face human interaction.
How we manage our people has had to change post Covid, we need to do things differently and essentially operate in a very different way. We wanted a development programme that supported our managers throughout the transition of working in this new way. We wanted to create a different, but still very positive culture, around management practice and style. There was a real need to re-define attitudes from within the business around the importance of how we communicate with, and develop our people. Now, more than ever, we are acutely aware of the impact our managers have on creating positive working and learning environments both when working remotely and in the office.
We know that effective management in all organisations is widely recognised as critical to their success and at Carpenters Group we developed a programme that future proofed our existing and sustained success. The focus of the programme was around understanding our people’s working styles, playing to their strengths, encouraging more thought and actions to support and boost team morale and performance.
The programme consisted of 5 sessions and we have had c.80 managers go through the programme over the past 12 months. We are now in the process of planning (at least) another three cohorts commencing in January 2023. The cohorts are a mix of existing and aspiring managers, career development is a key objective within our people strategy, we are always planning for our people’s future careers!
The upskilling of so many of our managers over the past 12 months has affected so much positive and progressive change. It has been critical to employee engagement, to our organisational success but most importantly we have enhanced our managers' skills, competencies and knowledge so that they can successfully and effectively manage in this continually evolving new world.