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.
The programme has delivered real success and we see it in our people.
One administrator at the business did the course in 2021 and they are now a senior project manager. He couldn’t have done that without the CEO programme – it’s really helped him understand how leadership relationships work in the business.
Having said that we don’t start out on the basis of there being roles to fill in the company. The participants usually know the opportunities that exist in the business but they’re primarily looking to develop a range of skills. Another participant came in as a customer service agent but wanted to develop his confidence and increase the skills he had. As a result he was able to move out of customer service and went into a bid management role. As such he’s now an assistant to the chief executive. We didn’t plan this to happen but once he saw the opportunity he worked hard and gained sufficient confidence to feel he could take on the role.
Overall about 40% of participants on the CEO club have either experienced some sort of promotion or changed their career in the organisation.
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.
