Anna Vila Pouca from M&S shared her thoughts on one of the questions front of mind when exploring leadership development: Where do you begin?
“So at one end of that people leader spectrum you’ve got first line managers where they’re leading people but even within that sometimes they’re leading themselves and then the other end you’ve got people who are ready for the most senior levels in the organisation. I think as well you know sometimes we can get caught up and go what’s the best way to do this, you know do we start from the top and cascade that down, do we start at the lower levels and then wait for that to sort of trickle out and in my view you just go where the energy of the organisation is, you start where you can make the most change. I think and again lots of people on the call will relate to this you know retail is an impatient fast-paced business and we’re up against that challenge of time, so for us the energy we went with actually where can we start to create change immediately and more quickly because we know we’ve got that appetite there.
The particular work I’ve done with Ivy House focuses on that early year in career leadership so what we’ve really used your programme for is to help those people who are in those critical first line leader roles so that really the skill set they develop is something they can hopefully hang on to for their whole careers and actually with Ivy House we’ve put hundreds and hundreds of leaders through the programme which again you know I’m hopeful then they grow as the organisation grows and they grow through M&S that actually you’ve set a new standard at that level that as the organisation progresses so do our leaders. That doesn’t mean you ignore the top but I don’t think there’s one right way I think actually if you can start at the kind of the lower levels and the higher levels they meet in a lovely place in the middle at some point.”
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