Having completed a management buyout from the US parent, CBSbutler found itself with an organisation that had historically suffered from a somewhat 'sleepy culture' with restricted ambition and opportunities. The new board of directors wanted to pursue a strategy of organic growth with the aim of achieving aggressive revenue targets.

Consequently, we needed to raise staff performance, and further develop our high fliers to address succession planning issues. As a result, we embarked on a major project to create a true learning environment for our people and during the last quarter of 2006, held a focus group in which a number of issues were identified:

• A lack of coaching and mentoring skills - essential for future succession planning and leadership
• Reward systems that were unaligned to competencies and behaviours
• A lack of formal management development or succession planning
• Unclear training and development needs derived from existing reviews and appraisals
• Weak development of trainees due to the lack of a structured induction programme.

A formal leadership programme was also launched to address the issue of management succession. It was run by an external management consultancy combined with internal mentoring from directors and senior management.

Joe Brown, senior manager, CBSbutler: 

“I’ve been lucky enough to be selected for the leadership and talent management programme - and you have to earn your place. Sometimes I’ll be deployed at client sites so that I can gain an in-depth understanding of customer requirements. At other times I may be attending client specific training programmes to ensure an expert understanding of technologies and work processes. And from time to time I’ll attend briefing sessions given by industry specialists.”

Participants in the programme have to meet a clear set of performance, behaviour and value based criteria in order to qualify for the programme which consists of a series of workshops and training days with tailored coaching and development tasks.

We developed five new middle managers using these programmes and as a result, three high flyers were recruited into the senior management team.

These programmes have also been integrated into a performance management system where managers are appraised against six key behaviours:

• coaching and developing others
• drive for Results
• teamwork
• managing change
• problem solving & decision making
• organising & planning.
  

Where previously managers had been rewarded purely on the achievement of hard financial targets, this new system links their bonuses to positive management skills. The company believes that linking behaviours directly to reward achieves greater accountability.

The Results have been impressive. The company measured the Results of the prgramme at the end of the first year through both quarterly appraisals and employee surveys.