Would you like to find out more about creating a united Alliance? Just give Gemma a call as she loves a chat on the success of our partnership work with Transpennine Route Upgrade East.
Transpennine Route Upgrade East (TRU East) is a multi-billion-pound rail infrastructure project with five partners in collaboration as an Alliance. The aim is to deliver a high-performing railway to the east of Leeds bringing more frequent, more reliable, faster, and greener trains as part of the wider Transpennine Upgrade Programme. TRU East needed to embed their Alliance Principles to ensure that a united, collaborative culture existed across the whole workforce; a particular challenge when five separate businesses with their own cultures, values and behaviours are involved.
We began with cross-Alliance focus groups, to discover what it was like to work in the Alliance and what it needed to look like to ensure success. From there, we built out an extensive Alliance Culture Programme (ACP) which included a suite of tailored communication events, training and coaching for everyone at every level. The ACP was designed and rolled out to ensure that the whole workforce understood how they needed to live and breathe the culture within the context of their role. It also equipped managers with the necessary skills to lead with the culture driving their behaviour and decision making. A Future Leaders Programme was also established to identify and nurture talented individuals who could step up into leadership positions in the future, and to support the rail industry’s talent development initiatives. The ACP was initially delivered by Rambutan, then co-delivered and ultimately moved to delivery entirely by TRU East colleagues to ensure cost-effective longevity
An Alliance Culture Survey was designed, with a baseline measure taken at the very beginning to measure the impact of the ACP at all levels. Survey questions specifically targeted annually (and still target to this day) understanding of the Alliance, leading and working in line with its culture and general feelings towards it. To date, the ‘understanding’ scores have improved by 14%, ‘leading and working in line with its culture’ by 11% and ‘feelings’ by 13%.
We’ve also received some amazing feedback from people working within the Alliance:
The solution was split down into five levels, from the Alliance Management Team (AMT) right down to the frontline, helping everyone to live the Alliance culture. From the outset, the innovative, blended programme involved 16 AMT members, over 100 line managers and more than 400 frontline team members, but it has now touched around 800 employees as it continues to run year-on-year.
We developed a bespoke 360° feedback process based on the desired culture and the behaviours needed. This was utilised with the AMT and line managers, followed by individual coaching for the AMT and those on the Future Leaders Programme.
We designed and delivered interactive and highly engaging leadership development workshops, each tailored to the unique needs of the level it was aimed at, covering topics such as:
For all the levels, we provided additional content to accelerate development. This self-directed learning included activity sheets, top tips, online curated content (i.e. videos, podcasts and reading) and book recommendations.
We also developed leaders, managers and frontline staff to deliver facilitated sessions to their teams and continue the learnings they received from their own workshops.
Additional to this, we designed and delivered a Future Leaders Programme, established to identify and nurture talented individuals who could step up into leadership positions in the future. It’s a blended programme of self-directed learning, workshops, group projects and individual coaching to build reflective practice and increase leadership potential. The content is adapted for challenges relevant to each cohort.
As a result, participants have a deeper understanding of the knowledge, skills and behaviours necessary for being a successful leader, but also an improved self-awareness and the skills to face workplace challenges. Some of the content covered includes:
Throughout the ACP, we designed and facilitated large scale face-to-face and virtual team events to the whole Alliance, to ensure everyone understood the vision, mission and culture of the Alliance and the parts everyone played in delivering them. These events were high impact, using a blend of fun, interactive exercises, live collaboration as one united team, and building relationships across the Alliance.
“The creation of an Alliance, as the methodology to successfully deliver multi-million-pound projects, is key to continuing to develop the industry in achieving its aims of delivering projects on time and in budget. The development of the right culture for an Alliance is then key, especially in terms of working collaboratively. The Alliance Culture Programme is the bedrock of creating the collaborative environment needed, ensuring all the project participant organisations and their teams come together to achieve their aim. The team at Rambutan managed to take an extremely complicated organisation and pull together the principals of what was needed, looking at the different aspects and creating a programme that ticked all the requirements. Their involvement in the delivery was excellent and their handover process meant the programme could continue successfully to the end of the project, utilising the budget in the most effective way.”
Lesley Cheeseman, Organisational Development Lead