Clients / Case study

Nuturing senior talent in hospitality

In the fast-paced and competitive hospitality sector, how do we rise to the challenge to nurture and retain key talent?

The brief

The commercial world is changing rapidly and leaders are facing a volatile, uncertain, more complex and ambigous workplace requiring a different style of leadership and response. So when Premier Inn approached us to help them develop a stretching and innovative talent development programme to support their area managers who had been identified as senior managers of the future, we were delighted to get involved.

The challenges

In common with many organisations facing sudden growth, Premier Inn found that despite having many skilled and capable people, they needed more ‘ready’ senior talent to lead their faster, more agile organisation. This, allied with a perceived lack of career opportunities at senior level, was resulting in frustration from those with high potential and a gap in senior leadership succession. Existing learning and development programmes provided good operational skills but didn’t always prepare managers for the ‘step up’ needed to move into a senior position soemtimes across sites in this new and challenging world.

The solutions

Having conducted a robust up-front discovery process with key leaders and stakeholders to understand the challenge in more depth, we designed Horizons, a fresh talent development programme to prepare leaders ready for the opportunities of growth, competition and global expansion. We made sure the multi-faceted programme role-modelled their world by blending more traditional ‘face to face’ workshops with virtual skill shots, digital ‘nudges’, immersive experiential activities hard-wired to today’s workplace and work-based projects enabling them to demonstrate their capabilities to a wider senior audience.

Working in partnership with key senior managers, we were able to incorporate business elements which provided the clear commercial context and made sure the programme reflected the operational realities of their world. The programme also had a personal focus, including tools for driving self-development, strengths-based 360 degree feedback and an opportunity to gain exposure at a senior level through mentoring and networking events. From the very start, senior directors were involved and participated in reviews during and after the programme.

The results

While we know our evaluation data shows retention and motivation have significantly increased, programmes like this can be best judged in the words of those who took part:

• “My team have noticed the difference in me, and being positive with the team did definitely come from the programme.”
• “The programme’s been absolutely brilliant for me, particularly the 360 and the sessions relating to physiology and managing emotions. Whitbread’s investment really will pay dividends for me.”
• “I now achieve more by doing less, ask more questions and delegate more. This programme has been awesome, made a big difference to me and will really help me in the future.”
• “This programme has made a huge difference to me. I’ve increased the planning and reflection I do, prepare more for meetings and am much stronger on delegating. And it’s been noticed!”