Driving leadership change
by Lance
The challenge
The Royal Automobile Club has an ambitious 10-year strategy to sustain the Club’s prominence as one of the foremost private members’ clubs in the world. Part of this strategy is to improve the effectiveness of the Club Management Committee (CMC) and Executive Team (ET). The CMC and ET are full of passionate people, all wanting to deliver significant change and improvement for their part of the organisation. However, there were issues with silo-working and inconsistency in role modelling the Club’s values and behaviours.
The solution
We started by designing a bespoke 360º feedback survey. This specifically linked to the staff values (Heritage, Excellence, Accountability, Respect and Trust) and the leadership behaviours (Listen, Empower, Inspire, Demonstrate and Fair) of the Club. The 360º feedback survey allowed us to measure how aligned teams and individuals were to the Club’s values and behaviours. We created a team score along with individual feedback for each member of the CMC and ET which highlighted strengths, and where the team or individual could develop.
The result
Over the past three years the 360º feedback survey has evolved and been rolled out to more leaders and managers with 45 people now benefiting from team and individual feedback. The bespoke survey allowed us to tailor development in the areas which would benefit most. This meant resources and budgets were effectively utilised.
Want to know more?
The Royal Automobile has a very proud heritage. Founded in 1897 with the aim of encouraging the development of motoring in Britain, the Club is one of London’s finest private members’ clubs, combining over 100 years of luxury and tradition with exceptional facilities and outstanding service.
It was essential we worked closely with the CMC and ET to ensure our solution was aligned to the Club’s values and tradition. We designed a bespoke 360º survey for team and individual feedback to measure values and behaviours. A Rambutan consultant shared the feedback report with every participant and coached them through the results. At the end of each coaching session the participant had identified the key areas they could work on to make them more effective in their role.
The team scores were shared as a group and the team members agreed what they should work on to become more effective for both the CMC or ET.
A ‘feedback’ culture is now becoming more evident at The Club and this year nearly 500 feedback surveys were completed by staff, managers, and leaders. In addition, every one of the participants looked forward to their feedback; with many of them reviewing how their scores had improved as a result of their own personal development journey throughout the three years.
The 360º feedback survey is now part of the annual appraisal discussion and feeds into the succession planning of the Club. As a result, many of these individuals have benefited from personal coaching and this year more are looking at using a coach to help them develop even further. This has resulted in 94% of the feedback scores for the CMC being judged a core strength and over the last two years, 75% of the feedback scores for the ET have increased or remained consistently high.
What Julia said…
“Rambutan quickly gained the respect and trust of the whole senior management team and worked with us to develop a bespoke and highly effective 360° feedback process based on our leadership behaviours. The whole process was stress-free for us and the reports are insightful, succinct and help our development. The combination of these reports coupled with Rambutan’s skilful coaching has made the feedback process challenging, and very positive for all involved. We have already seen positive improvements in collaborative working, trust and other important measures of team effectiveness.”
Julia Mixter, HR Director
If you’d like to know more about how we helped The Royal Automobile Club, give either Lance or David a shout because they’d love to chat about this project.
