Case study: optimising leadership effectiveness – BSI
Developing leadership at a growing national standards body
The challenge
BSI had a relatively new top team that was setting an ambitious development agenda to transform the UK standards organisation into a powerful ally to organisations around the world interested in quality and performance enhancement. This development agenda required increasingly effective leadership at all levels in the organisation and especially at the top.
BSI’s CEO recognised that whilst the senior leadership team was comprised of highly experienced individuals, there was work to do to:
- make it a complete leadership unit that harnessed complementary differences in style and an exemplary model for leadership within the rest of the organisation;
- ensure that the leadership capability of each team member could be objectively evaluated against a framework based on the leadership requirements of the organisation.
The challenges of collective leadership effectiveness can be described in five questions:
1. Are all the essential leadership capabilities present in the team at the quality level required?
2. How clear is the team on what it is seeking to achieve?
3. How aligned is the team aligned behind its vision?
4. How well does the team harness the strengths of its members?
5. How well do the members understand themselves and each other?
BSI’s top team understood these issues well, however, these questions had not been systematically examined or answered by the organisation.
What we did
Edgecumbe was engaged by the people team at BSI to help them develop their leadership behaviours and leadership development offering across the business.
The BSI behavioural framework was integrated into Edgecumbe’s Primary Colours® of Leadership model. Against this model, we were able to provide assessments for both recruitment and development of BSI’s management population, working with leadership teams across the business. The individual developmental leadership assessments were used to support leadership development and performance development reviews at executive and senior management levels globally, as well as team assessments and workshops and recruitment assessments.
We worked with internal HR colleagues to complete branding customisation of our leadership development tools, including the NEO personality report, 360-degree feedback report and finally the Leadership Strengths Matrix report, which mapped the personality data against the performance data. This meant individual leaders could clearly see where their key strengths, development areas and limitation areas were. We trained internal HR colleagues to facilitate feedback conversations using these development tools and this assessment process was rolled out across the top leadership teams (SMT-1 and SMT-2) across APAC, EMEA and Americas regions.
For each team we created an aggregated analysis report to highlight the overall strengths and limitations against the Primary Colours® of Leadership framework, but the team sessions themselves were carried out internally within BSI. This meant that teams were able to discuss and explore the specific ways in which they could improve their effectiveness as a unit, ensuring close collaboration from the offset which was important for optimising their chance of success in improving how they worked together going forward.
In total, around 260 individuals throughout BSI completed the Leadership Behaviours Process.
The outcomes
- A leadership model that represented the BSI values and competencies.
- Aligned leadership behaviours embedded across the business.
- A consistent leadership development offering across the business.
- A robust assessment process for executive recruitment and selection to bring in key talent and mitigate risks.
- Departmental 360-degree feedback tools, with Time 1 and Time 2 reporting to track progress.
Edgecumbe have worked with us at BSI for over 10 years coaching our CEO and Executive Team. We asked them to help us develop our leadership behaviours and leadership development offering across the business. They put together a comprehensive design project and trained members of my team and I to deliver much of the data gathering ourselves. This method engaged many managers and leaders across the business in the model’s design. It not only made for a model that feels and sounds very BSI (despite being based on Edgecumbe’s leadership model which the exec team had been working with for years), but also meant that implementing the model was much more successful. The team at Edgecumbe are a pleasure to work with; they have the rare combination of being experts in their field and highly professional, but also hugely friendly, responsive and collaborative. They worked in real partnership with us.
