The turnaround of this giant retailer began with a $4 billion strategy designed to renew the majority of their stores and create a customer-focused, innovative, change-agile, and collaborative culture amongst 110,000 plus employees.

 

We were initially engaged to assess the readiness of our client Coles to successfully execute the renewal strategy. Reporting the results of the assessment to the board, we identified leadership culture as the number one barrier to a successful turnaround.

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A program was then developed to equip leaders with the skills and strategies to shift their own leadership behaviour and mindsets towards a more challenging and empowering style, and help them engage and mobilise others in the organization, promoting behaviour change at a concrete and practical level back in the workplace.

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We were engaged to lead the program and deliver it to the top 250 senior leaders. The success of the initial workshops saw the target audience expand to more than 1400 leaders, effectively engaging every people manager in the organisation. Later the program concepts and techniques were introduced into emerging leadership pipelines.

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Twelve months following the initiation of the program, an Impact Assessment reported that the overwhelming majority of leaders found the program to be making a positive contribution to business success at a personal and organizational level.

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To further support the culture change program, a team performance workshop was developed to support a move towards team-based working. Additional team development workshops were conducted with executive leadership teams in various locations around Australia, all designed to improve business results through high performance teamwork.

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More than three years following the commencement of the program rollout, the business continued to report ongoing sustained improvement in results, outperforming their main competitor in all measures. Employees reported significant shifts in culture and sustained evidence of a healthier and higher performing organisation. As further evidence of a sustained successful turnaround the business continued to be the main contributor to its parent companies superior share price performance until its spin off in 2019, crystallising extremely handsome capital gains made as a result of the transformation.