Why
With around 2,000 people employed globally, King has grown at an incredible pace since being founded in 2003. People are at the heart of what they do and two specific needs were identified:
1. to support managers to re-connect with their team members to ensure that productivity within all the areas of the business remained high.
2. to empower their individual contributors to take control of and drive their own career development.
In such a creative industry, the need for engaged people who are more likely to know how to search out new methods, techniques and innovation is critical to stay competitive and cutting edge.
A general lack of conversational experience and skill is one of the top barriers businesses face in the UK. Acknowledging this and investing in the capabilities of their managers to drive impactful conversations through the business, was the driver for King to get to the heart of the challenges of engagement.
What
In partnership we developed two distinct offerings to support these two sides of the engagement puzzle. One to support managers: Grow My Team (part of a suite of management modules available to all managers), and a second: Grow My Career, to support all employees, specifically individual contributors.
Grow My Team is designed to help managers engage in a more human way and understand their responsibility to be the conduit between their team members and the wider business. It builds their conversational skills to help drive motivation by ensuring people feel connected to the opportunities that the organisation can provide. The idea being that, in turn, this will enable everyone to more effectively and efficiently realise their potential at work through active engagement.
The main objectives of the course are to:
- Provide a clear understanding of why performance and development conversations matter
- Offer insight into the motivations of team members and how to interpret and understand these
- Know how to build trust as a manager and the importance of genuine interest in the career of others
- Appreciate the psychology of conversations and support a conversational mindset
- Understand how to translate the outcomes of development conversations into clear development steps/actions
Using a blend of theory and thinking stimulus, activities and pair/small group conversations, managers explore and practice conversational skills, along with a toolkit of techniques and a framework. These all help them start to grow the understanding, knowledge and skills they need to drive more human connection, build greater trust and demonstrate more care with their team members – all key ingredients of any good leader.
Grow My Career followed the launch of Grow My Team and was designed to align language, messaging and some of the techniques across the two learner journeys. The main drivers of the course are to:
- Help people understand how to take ownership and control of their careers
- Grow an understanding that career development is broader than simply progressing up the ladder
- Expand their view to encompass learning experiences as a rich and valuable part of career development
- Become better skilled and prepared to have performance and career development conversations with their managers
- Understand how to structure and articulate their own individual development
Each learner journey blends pre and post engagement (both human and digital) with highly interactive workshop sessions including time to reflect and practice. This has proved a successful combination with participants sharing significant lightbulb moments as takeaways from the course.
Impact
Managers are implementing techniques from the Grow My Team toolkit with successful results, and the building of a shared language on both sides of the engagement equation is actively enhancing better, more engaging conversations.
Globally, 50% (approximately 500) of the managers have been through the workshops.
Don’t just take our word for it, click here to see to Sabrina Carmona, Senior Producer at King talk about Grow My Team.
You can also listen to Trevor Hudson, Senior Learning Business Partner, talk about why King have invested time and resource into career conversations, in our webinar here.
