CORE™ Leadership 
Background
Our client is one of the largest and most recognizable travel retailers in North America and is committed to enhancing the travel experience for over 300,000 travelers every day in the continental United States and Canada. They own and manage over 1,000 duty-paid and duty-free stores in 89 locations, including airports, commuter terminals, hotels and some of the most visited landmarks and tourist destinations in the world.
Challenge
In February 2018, our client went public with an IPO. With being a public company, it requires more oversight from their new Board of Directors. The quality of their business strategy, leadership and culture plays a major factor in stock evaluation so this led them to continue their people development journey. With the continued growth of the business, our client put an emphasis on operations and turnover, and did not provide as much focus on talent management for a considerable number of years. Our client engaged Human Edge to help determine their bench strength and how to best identify and develop leaders.
Process
As a first step, human resource data was analysed by the internal team to determine their greatest talent risks. With the information gathered, a new talent review process was designed. Since our client did not have any structure in place, it was possible to identify talent pools from the get-go and design a completely new process using the latest tools and methods to deliver talent outcomes. The third and last step consisted of building capability within the HR team which included the operationalisation of the new talent review processes so in turn they could train leaders on how to use the new process.
The deliverables for this project included:
- Clear understanding of their talent risks: strength of their leadership pipeline and the throughput of talent through the pipeline.
- Leaders brought into the talent review process.
- Identified ten high potentials for senior positions.
- Clear approach to accelerating high performance talent.
- Replicable talent review process.
Outcomes
A new talent process was created that had clear definitions and behavioral anchors for leaders to effectively assess talent for potential. During the project it was critical that we determined the audience to test the new tools and make any adjustments before it was rolled out throughout the entire organization. This process worked as the client was able to readily gain commitment and buy-in from senior leaders on the process and the approach.
The projected yielded the following:
- Clear understanding of their talent risks: strength of their leadership pipeline and the throughput of talent through the pipeline.
- Identified ten high potentials for senior positions. It raised awareness that in order to grow they needed to further invest in leadership and talent development.
- They also discovered that their average age of shop managers was 38 which was way too high causing them have to go outside for their critical roles.
- Clear approach to accelerating high performance talent.
- Replicable talent review process.
If you would like to know more our talent practice area please contact us here for more information.
