At Smith & Nephew, there were lots of onboarding guides and tools for new leaders to help then them understand company culture and business, as well as key Talent procedures that leaders are responsible for, such as hiring, onboarding, performance review, development planning, etc. But to execute these procedures effectively and to lead their teams to create great products and services for their customers, new leaders need to be equipped with some fundamental leadership and managerial skills. They need to master leadership behaviors that support collaboration, teamwork, creative problem solving and process improvement. They must be able to have difficult conversations, when needed, provide timely feedback and coaching support – tasks that many first-time leaders struggle with, especially when they get promoted from an individual contributor role where they were responsible for their own performance only. This is why the leadership development team got to work on creating a program to initiate a learning journey for new leaders, help them develop fundamental skills and competencies and build relationships with other first-time leaders from around the company.
To start the process of developing what would become their Leadership Beginnings program, the team compiled a comprehensive list of leadership competencies aligned with their culture pillars of Care, Courage and Collaboration. The list was then reduced to the skills and competencies that the development team referred to as “leadership fundamentals” or “leadership essentials’’ – just what new leaders need in the first year in the new role.
From there, they worked with Skillsoft to develop the program framework and curate the content from Skillsoft’s Leadership and Business portfolio in a variety of learning formats – videos, courses, book summaries and articles. The team added some bespoke content on the S+N-specific processes and procedures, such as their SAID feedback model. The focus was on making the program content pragmatic and applicable. They wanted new leaders to walk away with skills they could apply right away. To help them practice new skills in a safe environment before they begin to apply them in the real world, the team incorporated the elements of experiential and collaborative learning by including assignments and small learning group meetings where participants could practice the skills and techniques they learned about in the course of the program. Finally, they added several live webinars in every program section to complement self-paced online education with instructor-led learning experiences. And with that their program was set up and ready to go.
