The rapidly-growing company has broken the trend of many other organisations by investing in development, rather than cutting spend. Daisy has teamed up with SFL, a leadership and change management consultancy, to deliver Daisy’s first ever talent programme, which aims to develop leaders of the future.
Clare Martin, Group HR Director at Daisy, explained: “Having acquired 36 companies in the last five years, Daisy has experienced dramatic growth as a business and is continuing to evolve.
“It’s due to this rapid expansion that the company has always had to source external talent, rather than developing its own talent that already exists within the business.
“Working with SFL, we are excited at the prospect of taking our most accomplished managers and unleashing their capabilities in order to develop our next leadership team and produce significant commercial differences.”
Karen Nixon, Account Director at SFL, added: “Talent development is crucial to an organisation's growth plans and sustainability, but is often not focussed on or addressed appropriately at a CEO level. The human capital of an organisation is its biggest investment, yet is rarely maximised through robust talent mapping and succession planning.
“For a fast-paced organisation like Daisy, we have designed a tailor made programme that will tap into to the real talent already present and develop them into leaders of the future.”
Following a day’s intensive training at a Talent Assessment Centre, Daisy selected a cross representation of managers from different departments to take part in the 12 month programme, which will be delivered through a series of seven learning modules throughout the year, coupled with work based mentoring and projects.
Launched at the Oaks Hotel, Reedley, near Daisy’s headquarters in Lancashire, the Induction Module, “Raising self-awareness”, saw the 11 chosen candidates from Daisy’s offices in Nelson, Prudhoe and Birmingham, take part in fun tasks to gain an understanding of their own personal style and behaviour, and how these impact on performance.
Subsequent modules will touch on “Delivering commercial results”, “Being a great leader” and “Financial awareness”, to name a few.
Karen added: “Throughout these modules, candidates will not only learn more about themselves, but will explore other aspects of business, including product development, efficiency opportunities and management skills.
“All candidates will also be expected to deliver their own project, identifying where they could help Daisy add commercial difference. To help, they have each been assigned a member of Daisy’s leadership team, who will be their individual sponsor and mentor throughout the programme.”
Clare commented: “Having already successfully run similar types of programmes in other organisations, I know there are numerous benefits to developing our own home-grown talent, especially during a period of continuous growth and change.
“We expect to see significant commercial changes in the next three to four months, including noticeable improvements in customer satisfaction and measurable returns in our investment.
“Not only that, we are looking forward to the programme providing us with our next leadership team, who in turn, will look into how they develop their own teams to determine Daisy’s continued future success.”