Bombardier Transportation

Bombardier Transportation is the global leader in the rail equipment manufacturing and servicing industry, present in more than sixty countries on five continents.

To meet the challenges of delivering a wide portfolio of projects involving multi-divisional, multi-site and multi-cultural project teams, the leadership team decided to restructure the transportation business to become a project led organisation. This placed greater demands on the leadership skills and capability of project managers right across the business.

Bombardier chose Learning Partners to design and deliver the global leadership programme for the multi-cultural project management population across five continents. The programme was so successful that Bombardier extended the scope to leaders in all roles across the whole company and chose Learning Partners to develop a global Team Effectiveness Programme. As the long term relationship with Bombardier goes from strength to strength, Learning Partners have been involved in diverse projects such as designing and running conferences, providing conference speakers, developing values and behaviours for culture change, and coaching senior leaders and executive teams.

The global programmes have been running successfully for years and deliver return on investment measured in increased productivity, improved effectiveness in problem solving (saving time and cost), better alignment and cooperation between projects, functions and divisions, higher levels of employee engagement and increased revenue and cash flow for the business (as high as 400% increase).

Network Rail

Network Rail Infrastructure Projects (IP) is one of the largest delivery businesses in the country and delivers thousands of projects around the country of infrastructure renewals and enhancements aimed at delivering a bigger, better railway and enabling more trains to run at higher speeds with more seats and better facilities at stations up and down the country. 

Learning Partners is working with the Executive Team of Network Rail IP to strengthen the team performance and to ensure the Executive acts as a highly effective, collaborative leadership team providing clear direction, governance and challenge in a mutually supportive way. This involves helping the IP Executive ensure they focus on those areas where they can add the most value and in setting the overall tone and culture of IP.

Sitecore

Sitecore is the global leader in customer experience management software committed to helping marketers own every customer experience.   Sitecore’s employees are in demand as their skills are very current and marketable.

Learning Partners has helped their UK business deliver rapid transformational change and realise the Sitecore values.  Our experience in integrating initiatives meant that they achieved change with minimum effort as we helped them to pull their approach into a cohesive People Strategy.

We first worked with their leadership team and their managers to develop an understanding of their own and others’ personality, values and behaviours, so that they could directly interpret and role model Sitecore values.  We helped them roll out this awareness across their whole organization, so that people noticed how their personal values already aligned with Sitecore and how to engage with and demonstrate new values.  We are now supporting them in linking this work to performance management and reward.

Sitecore in the UK has won an award for being ‘a great place to work’.  High employee satisfaction correlates with customer satisfaction, success and growth.

The Sitecore UK approach is being taken up by other areas of their business.

Hitachi Rail Europe

Hitachi Rail Europe Ltd (HRE) is the European HQ of the Transportation Division of Hitachi Ltd. The Head Office is located in London and a maintenance depot for the Class 395 trains in Ashford, Kent.

HRE is responsible for the business operation of the transportation division's products and systems in Europe and makes use of the most up-to-date, modern and energy efficient engineering technology developed in Japan. HRE was awarded the contract for the Intercity Express Programme in the UK for supply and maintenance of rolling stock and is building a depot in Newton Aycliffe to manufacture rolling stock.

HRE wanted an efficient and effective approach to managing the project, even though the company continued to expand at a rapid pace with new staff, new systems, new processes and new leadership.

Learning Partners ran team workshops to concentrate on establishing a structured and consistent project governance, with full commitment from team members to manage tasks and communication through common project goals. A key element of these activities was to establish good relationships within the team and also with the Japanese design and manufacturing team.

HRE reported greater control and visibility of key tasks using this structure and are rolling out this approach across all projects.

Mitie

Mitie Group PLC is a British strategic outsourcing and energy services company. It provides infrastructure consultancy, facilities management, property management, energy and healthcare services.

Mitie operates in a fast-paced environment with numerous transactional activities.  Like many organisations it needs to be exceptionally productive and efficient with an energetic and results-focused culture balanced with teamwork, forward-thinking and constructive relationships.

We have supported Mitie in running several Team Effectiveness events fostering self and others awareness, strengthening teamwork and ‘psychological safety’ in the teams so that they work seamlessly together and balance innovation with operational excellence.

Sony

Learning Partners has a solid track record working with high technology businesses and across many key functions.  In Sony, we worked with the Sales function supporting them through some transformational change, stimulated by the consequences of the recession.  We were able to support them in streamlining their sales processes and integrating these with clear role profiles that linked into performance management and delivered greater Operational Effectiveness.

We drew on our comprehensive knowledge of behaviours to help them identify the skills and attributes required in different sales roles and levels, so that their Sales Leaders could select, motivate, manage and develop a high performing salesforce made up of Talented People.

SAP UK Limited

Headquartered in Walldorf, Germany, with locations in more than 130 countries, SAP SE is the world leader in enterprise software and software-related services.

Learning Partners has a long-standing relationship with SAP across the UK, Ireland and Europe and South Africa. Since 2004 Learning Partners has delivered projects as diverse as Management Excellence, Team Leadership, Consulting Skills, Coaching and Mentoring training; Team Workshops for many departments; coaching; career frameworks; client user group events; conference facilitation. In particular, Learning Partners supported Active Global Support (AGS) with consultancy, coaching and training, through their rapid growth, when they achieved a 1000% increase in revenue with only 700% increase in staff.

NHS Foundation Trust

Learning Partners have worked for nearly twenty years from board to Ward level with clinical and non-clinical groups in many different parts of the NHS; Acute Trusts, Community Services Trusts, Clinical Commissioning Groups.

These complex organisations have been facing a huge amount of change and leadership challenges.  Our work has included:

• Design and Facilitation of numerous Away Days, Board Meetings, Clinical Strategy Planning Workshops with outcomes of Strategy Development, Culture Change and Values roll-out
• Team Effectiveness Workshops (especially in ‘turnaround’ situations of stress and Monitor scrutiny)
• Coaching (e.g. Resilience coaching) for Directors, Managers, Clinicians and Nurse Leaders
• Leadership Development Centres and Selection of Associate Medical Directors and Consultants
• Design and Delivery of Development Programmes and Toolkits
• Leadership Programmes especially for clinical staff
• Competency Based Assessment

Zehnder Group UK

Zehnder is a subsidiary of the Zehnder Group in Switzerland. The Zehnder group has representatives world-wide and is the European market leader in the construction of special design installations for heating, cooling and air filtration in the commercial sector, and in radiators for all types of domestic heating.

Zehnder UK had acquired a number of smaller and diverse radiator companies, which addressed different market sectors. The UK MD wanted to create a unified culture, whilst maintaining the unique attributes of each brand. Learning Partners addressed this by aligning individual roles and responsibilities to the overall Zehnder strategy and goals, and creating a clearly defined set of competencies and behaviours, which defined how people would behave in the unified culture. This approach was reinforced and supported through training in Performance Management process and skills that enabled the business to measure individual performance, encourage staff to realise their full potential and to design individual development plans to support continuous learning.

This approach delivered significant improvements in morale, motivation and performance across all companies.

AECOM

AECOM is a global provider of professional technical and management support services to a broad range of markets, including transportation, facilities, environmental, energy, water and government. The UK firm wanted to attract the best graduates and invest in a formal development programme leading to a qualification of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS).

Learning Partners designed a competency framework, which provided the benchmark for recruitment and development. Working with AECOM staff Learning Partners co-designed a technical and ‘soft skills’ programme using on-the-job scenarios, combining training and assessment.

Results for the firm included; an increase in revenue for graduates by 60%, owing to higher RICS qualification rate, quicker promotion and higher retention of qualified graduates; saving of over £500k in recruitment fees and ROI of £460k in the first 3 years alone; the deficit of professional staff was eliminated. The programme has set the industry standard and has won a prestigious National Training Award.

H. R. Owen

H.R. Owen is Britain's leading luxury motor dealer, and the world's largest retailer in Rolls-Royce, Bentley, Lamborghini and Bugatti brands. Marketing was carried out independently within each brand and H.R. Owen wanted to bring together the separate Marketing teams across all brands to ensure a consistent high quality, share expertise and gather feedback and results from all marketing activities to measure efficiency and effectiveness.

Learning Partners ran team workshops with the joint team to increase efficiency, save time and effort, improve communication, build trust within the team and foster a partnership culture across all brands. H.R. Owen were able to consolidate marketing expertise, share knowledge and skills and respond quickly and flexibly across all brands to the fast paced varied requirements of social, digital and event marketing.

Nokia

Nokia is a global brand and a very complex organisation that has experienced some reverses in their marketplace and has worked through some challenging times. Learning Partners’ experience with Nokia has predominantly been in developing Team Effectiveness, helping teams in many different functions across Europe to respond to the change, set goals and objectives, operate more efficiently and build trust and common values.

This has been in the context both of market success and commercial troubles.  Teams more recently have needed to be resilient and self-aware, and more flexible in their responses, Learning Partners’ delivered a toolkit of techniques that helped them to achieve this.

Learning Partners’ ability to convey understanding of personality, values and behaviours and to describe ‘Emotional Logic’ resonated and helped professionals who were often facing difficulties for the first time in their careers.

Basware

Basware Corporation is a Finnish software company and works with enterprises around the world to automate accounts payable, e-procurement and e-invoicing processes. Basware offers a unique combination of 25 years experience in financial process automation, the world's largest open commerce network, and leading-edge technological innovation. Basware has a global sales and marketing organisation and wanted to make best use of internal resources, such as product, technical and pre-sales specialists, by implementing standards in sales processes, sales roles, sales leadership, sales methodology and sales people development across all countries. The Sales Leadership also wanted to implement Value-based selling as a company standard.

Learning Partners’ team of experts in sales and skills development worked with the Sales Leadership and HR team in Basware to facilitate a consistent approach to sales and marketing and helped design and roll out the training by train the trainer.

Basware continue to implement this approach and are reaping the benefits of reduced cost of sale and ensuring a high standard of customer satisfaction.

Thunderbird

Thunderbird School of Global Management in Arizona State University

Thunderbird run a successful organisation outside their formal academic faculty responsible for delivering in house culture change, leadership and management programmes to prestigious international clients.  These programmes need to be leading edge, tailored to the culture of the client and practical as they are typically rolled out globally to large organisations.  The programmes and their Thunderbird tutors are rigorously evaluated.

We have passed their strict evaluation standards and are accredited as part of their Educators’ Network of Tutors and Consultants, meaning that we are chosen to design and deliver global leadership and management foundation programmes to high profile clients such as the Global Fund in Geneva.

Thunderbird relies upon our depth of experience, leading edge thinking and client relationship skills.