Global Fashion Group (E-commerce | EU, UK, LatAm, SEA, Russia)
Global Fashion Group is an e-commerce start-up with 15,000 employees across five discrete businesses based in the UK, EU, Latin America, South-East Asia, and Russia, which had been acquired over time and had unique cultures and disparate systems and processes to identify, manage and develop talent.
The Business Need
The Group Function had no oversight of the leadership pipeline, nor common standards, behaviours or metrics to align the talent across the world. The need was identified to design a talent review based on contemporary thought leadership, to align, measure and support leadership levels three down from Executive globally, to identify and accelerate super high potentials and identify and nurture emerging talent.
The Solution
Going beyond a nine-box grid, a meaningful system was created that was straightforward to implement, ensured long-term stakeholder buy-in, yet had sufficient agility to navigate the onslaught of geopolitical, business and organisational challenges.
Communication, engagement and development approaches were developed and implemented to unite the business regions behind the global leadership aspiration, to educate local leadership and People & Culture functions to support the audit, engage with teams and manage the talent conversations and data gathering.
Using input from the Global Executive team, best practices and global cultural values, a bespoke competency framework was built and implemented, and learning curated to populate a community learning portal for use across GFG. Combined with a facilitated exercise to combine these elements with contemporary thought leadership, the framework by which we could assess talent and action support and development planning initiatives was built.
Global learning communities were established, to nurture and stretch leadership cohorts and to provide individual, group and team development. Spectiv 360 was used to inform development planning and leadership coaching support. A leadership development programme was developed and implemented to ready the pipeline and futureproof the organisation, including online and blended learning, a global mentoring programme and on-going performance and development feedback, along with targeted coaching initiatives.
The Outcome
The Executive Team were given the opportunity to understand their talent pool, and get to know their leaders of now and the future in a way that created new avenues for business and organisational development, and individual growth that would otherwise have remained invisible. Attrition rates from high potentials and performers reduced significantly. While critical risk areas were identified and managed proactively and in a much more timely and effective way.
A continuous conversation was created across the Global and Regional Executive Teams to share leadership insights, pain points and challenges, to facilitate easier and smoother movement of key talent, and to ensure risks were managed and opportunities exploited.
The discussions were backed with a rigorous and consistent system of data analysis and human input, enabling the people, leaders and organisation to become more agile and resilient through incredibly challenging geopolitical and economic environments.
The Global Talent Review process has been regularly evaluated, adapted and improved for continued relevance and effectiveness, ensuring that key stakeholders become long-term partners, talent is fully appreciated, recognised and leveraged, and the organisation continues to grow and achieve its goals.