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Emerging leaders at Sainsbury's

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Nature lines
Industry
Retail
Solution
Emerging Talent
Talent Management

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
Atos
"I did not expect such a positive effect of remote training. I didn’t feel that this form of meeting hindered us or was an obstacle in the implementation of the training. Super."
Paul Clarke
FareShare (community partner)
Diageo
"The opportunity for FareShare to be a community partner and to tune into Diageo’s intellectual capital for the day was fantastic. We got a lot out of it and I’m looking forward to following up on some of the ideas.”
Anthony Surley
Training and Development Manager
Wates
“Our Developing Leadership Skills programmes have been extremely successful, combining leadership activities and peer feedback with business-specific projects requiring inspirational leadership in the workplace. A key objective for Wates in this programme is the transfer of learning back into the workplace and without a doubt the business projects allow this to happen. A number of business projects are now in the implementation phase and are adding value to the Group."