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Community learning for emerging leaders at Sainsbury's

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About

Sainsbury's is the second-largest chain of supermarkets in the United Kingdom. Impact worked with Sainsbury's to create a graduate programme that would bring to life Sainsbury's leadership behaviours using community action learning.

Sainsbury’s wanted to develop their graduates’ awareness of their personal impact and to increase their understanding of the interpersonal skills needed for working in a team environment whilst bringing to life Sainsbury's leadership behaviours

 

Impact designed a Community Action Learning project based at a primary school. The graduates were challenged to develop a green theme across the school and thus bring sustainability to life. It was a complex and consequential project to elicit real behaviours to explore and experiment with.

A half-day induction prior to the project framed the whole programme effectively, developing strategies and agreeing on outcomes without the risk of getting swallowed up in the task.

Innovative project design was required to meet the dual objectives of building leadership capacity and delivering a successful project for the community partner. The graduates worked in project teams to complete a healthy eating allotment, green team activities, an aromatic border and fence murals. Alongside the projects, a Learning Pod was designed to direct participants to explore and observe Leadership in Action.

"This is the first project we have undertaken with Impact. Our graduate induction programme has been traditionally very corporate - lots of slides and senior speakers. We strongly felt we wanted to provide an experience for these valuable new colleagues that better reflected the direction we are moving in as a business. The project delivered on every level; we were able to make a difference at the school in a way that was aligned with our different values and bring our behavioural framework alive for our graduates as they prepared to leap into the world of work. Their takeaways were very much about increased self-awareness and a great sense of camaraderie amongst the cohort, an experience we shall definitely repeat."

Sue Round, Head of Leadership Development

Testimonials
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Participant
Senior Manager
AB InBev
“The breakout rooms worked really well, allowing for building deeper relationships with other participants and more networking."
Paul Lloyd
Group Head of Learning, Competence and Talent
Cape
"Our Future Leaders Programme aims to make sure that our Leaders & Managers have the kind of leadership skills Cape are going to need in the future. It's all about creating good role models for our people. This programme has helped managers to remove any remaining barriers and to enable our people to be the best that they can be."
Roy White
HR Head, Global Sales & Marketing, Sony
Streetfootballworld
‘When Sony decided to sponsor the FIFA World Cup we were keen to try to do something different with the sponsorship. Our ongoing partnership with streetfootballworld has been one of the outcomes of this desire. In all of this work we have partnered with Impact in ensuring that we get the best out of the partnership with some amazing results. Impact have enabled our most talented people to develop real leadership skills through their engagements with streetfootballworld partners.’