Telefonica
Board-level course to boost cross-functional working and aid team work
Summary
Telephonica in the UK (O2) faces continuous change as the tech sector moves ever-onwards. Tangram was tasked with working closely with the HR Director and her direct team to help equip them for these changes.
Background
Telephonica will be selling the O2 business in 2016. As such, the current HR feels it is critical to equip the current O2 management teams with the skills and knowledge to thrive with their new owners. To this end, a series of interconnected leadership courses have been designed and implemented to form a complete programme.
Challenge
The SLT within Telephonica face huge challenges in managing their people and business in an ever-changing environment. Tangram was tasked with aiding the team work more closely together and understand their unique strengths in facing the challenges ahead.
Solution
We worked closely with the business manager of the team to firstly understand the characteristics of the team, what they wished to achieve and what they had done to-date.
We completed a full-day workshop with a classic mix of challenges and problem solving exercises. Each of these was thoroughly facilitated and debriefed to pick out key learning points. With communication flowing and a new level of trust within the team we then opened up the discussions to the giving and receiving of purposeful feedback. As always with SLTs this needs to be carefully controlled as egos, culture and turf-wars can prove a blockage to team development – this was not the case with this fabulous team.
Outcomes
The team now has a much higher level of trust and understanding between each of them. Rather than just being excellent functional heads who come together once a month for a meeting, they are now forming into a proper team with cross-functional working and higher levels of output.
“It would be great to get your thoughts on next steps. We have some time talking about it at the senior leadership meeting and there is definitely an enthusiasm to continue the good work started at the offsite.“
Julia Gorski
Business Manager to UK HR Director, O2