Case Study - People & Culture: Esprit

Background:

• Esprit is an international youth lifestyle brand, which operates in over 40 countries and has in excess of 8,400 employees.
• The Australian business employs a youthful management team and identified an opportunity to increase base leadership skills across the Australian business.

Need:

• Esprit required a leadership program that would provide its store based and head office management team with a broader understanding of leadership principles and approaches within Esprit.
• Esprit identified priority improvement areas for their management team which included improving manager visibility, communication, mentoring, goal setting, conflict resolution and taking the Esprit vision and values to frontline staff.
• Esprit also identified a need to break down the barriers between head office and store level employees improving communication flows and overall understanding of different business functions and priorities.

Solutions:

• After understanding Esprit Australia’s strategic issues and HR requirements, we developed a customised training program for the Esprit management team.
• The training program was based on our Engaging Leaders™ program focusing on communication and living and breathing the Esprit vision and values.
• The interactive workshop sessions used adult learning principles, scenarios based on workplace reality, elements of creative thinking and fun action based learning to ensure skills learned were transferred to the workplace.
• The workshop sessions were tailored and customised to use ‘Esprit Language’ and workbooks were provided to individual participants.
• Individuals were offered coaching to address the challenges of applying the learned material to individual workplace situations.
• The leadership workshop sessions were aimed at also preparing managers to deal with an expected slowdown of the Esprit business and equip them with the skills to galvanise their team by responding positively to changing market conditions.

Outcomes:

• The leadership training program unified the Esprit management team and taught the team how to be more effective role models, coaches and great communicators.
• The program specifically equipped the management team with greater skills to communicate better with team members and divisional counterparts, share the Esprit vision and better demonstrate the Esprit Values, and empower employees for action.
• Esprit leaders developed the skills to bring out the best in their people.

“Feedback from attendees was very positive. The Right Group took the time to understand our business, values and culture, and developed a program that complemented this, the sessions held were highly interactive and action based.”

Ingrid Clarke, Human Resources Manager