‘Lead My Team’ a winning leadership development programme

The Brandon Hall Group Excellence Awards is a global programme that recognises innovation and achievement in the world of Human Capital Management. The group recently announced our project with Imerys as winner of the Silver Award in the category: Best Advance in Leadership Development. Here, we share how the project helped hundreds of managers across the company improve their performance.

Powerful leadership starts at the top. When you empower leaders to inspire their teams, the results can be hugely beneficial for both the individuals and the organisation.

This was the thinking behind one of our recent projects with the management team at Imerys – a multinational company that specialises in producing and processing industrial minerals. Safety and efficiency are naturally a high priority for Imerys, so they wanted to roll out a long-term training programme that would encourage a strong safety culture and build an ethos of continuous improvement.

Cegos was chosen as a training partner – owing to our reputation and global network – and the result was a 6-month programme called ‘Lead My Team’.

Lead My Team

The management team at Imerys were keen to raise the bar across their operations, which meant training up their supervisors to improve safety awareness as well as their managerial skills.

“Our supervisors at Imerys have different skills levels,” says Christina Hurgon, talent manager at Imerys. “It is crucial for us to help them assert themselves in their leadership role so they can champion security matters, topics for continuous improvement performance and team development. To do this, they need tools, techniques and support to elevate their teams to the required level. This is what they gain from the ‘Lead My Team’ programme.”

Cegos has a long history of helping people boost their leadership skills, so we recognised that training needed an integrated approach. As such, we developed a programme with a 4-step framework:

1. Pre-training interview
   Supervisor interviews helped us assess the current skill level of participants, so we could develop a targeted programme for improvement
2. In-class training
   Three days of workshops on the role of supervisor, effective communication and how to measure progress
3. Post-training activities
   A mix of in-house projects, e-learning, apps and follow-up interviews to re-inforce and embed learning
4. Project evaluation and certification
   An opportunity for participants to prove their skills acquisition for rigorous certification

The structure of the programme ensures that learning is successfully transferred and implemented. Supervisors are empowered with new skills and safety knowledge to pass onto their teams, which in turn improves performance.

Yet this project was challenging for several reasons. Firstly, we had to incorporate highly specialist knowledge into the programme. We achieved this by working in partnership with Imerys, who designed typical scenarios for our training team to work with.

Secondly, we had to deliver the programme across a global network, comprising different cultures and languages. Thankfully, Cegos has a training network across the globe, so we deployed our experts to localise training content to suit each market.

To date, over 1,000 participants from 40 countries have taken the programme and rated the training highly, with a score of 3.7/4 on average.

“‘Lead My Team’ is a highly-valued training course since it has very practical and interactive content and is underpinned by our supervisors’ needs,” says Christina Hurgon. “The trainers are essential to the success of the programme. That is why we have worked with Cegos to implement a process for selecting, training and coaching our trainers.”

Awards time

The success of ‘Lead My Team’ caught the eye of judges at Brandon Hall Group and resulted in a Silver Award in the Best Advance in Leadership Development category.

“The HCM Excellence Awards recognise programmes that measurably benefit organisations,” says Mike Cooke, Brandon Hall Group CEO. “Many human capital management departments are unable to confirm that their initiatives help the business’s bottom line. Because we focus on measurable benefits, our awards programme is universally recognised and highly prestigious.”

And Cegos is proud to be recognised for its role in the success of ‘Lead My Team’. “It is important for us to see our efforts create powerful results for our client,” says Christophe Perilhou, Learning and Solutions Director, “especially when you consider the challenge of delivering a training programme across a range of cultures. We always focus on making sure skills are transferred effectively, which was the reasoning behind the integrated process of ‘Lead My Team’. We are delighted that this has been recognised with such a prestigious award.”

Interested to learn more about how Cegos can help your leaders reach new heights? Contact us today.