5 May 2011
Purpose Development: An interview with OMD
Purpose Development: Creating leadership alignment & employee engagement
- Organisation: OMD New Zealand Limited
- Person: Jay Padden
- Role: People & Development Director
- Organisation size: 100 people
- Location: Auckland / Wellington
- Core Business: Communications & Media Agency
A bit of background
Due to an organisational realignment and expansion of our Executive Leadership Team, we wanted to get together to agree a cohesive approach to take OMD into the future (the next 5 years).
What was the challenge / opportunity?
We wanted to engage with the people in our business to establish an agreed vision and purpose. We also wanted to engage around how we would like to behave with each other; our core values.
What did we do?
Blacksmith worked with us to design two separate one day sessions; the first with our Executive Leadership Team, and the second with the Leadership Team and the next level of management which included most of our people managers, plus a sample of team members chosen to represent a cross section of the demographics of the whole agency.
On the first day we spent time reflecting on what we are good at as leaders, our successes and what we have already achieved. Then we defined what good leadership looks like for us and looked at the gaps. We spent the second half of the day looking at why we exist and where we want to take the business. This allowed us to establish a good platform for day two.
On the second day we presented our outputs from day one in terms of where we want to take the business, what we think we do well and where we think we can improve as a leadership team. We then worked in an interactive way to further develop the values and set up commitment from everyone for the behavioural changes needed in order for us to reach our goals and realise our vision and purpose.
What were the results?
- Gained clarity of our vision and values
- Agreed a common view of what the vision and values mean for us as a team
- Given we had come through a very intense period of work for everyone in the business, taking people out of “business as usual” to focus on our business, brand and looking to the future, was very beneficial.
This initiative was defiantly a morale booster and signalled to the business that we were serious about driving positive change – it certainly re-energised everyone.
What were the flow-on effects?
- An increase in engagement as shown in our recent engagement survey
- A renewed sense of belonging and involvement for our people
- Our values having clarity and becoming much more embedded in the day to day business
“Blacksmith took the time to really understand the base line we were starting from in terms of the people in our business. They designed sessions specifically for our business and situation which had the effect of really engaging our team – their preparation was very good”