The Client
Gate One is an award-winning business and digital transformation consultancy, based in St Pancras Square, London. Working across many sectors, including life sciences, retail and consumer business, and the public sector, Gate One supports some of the world’s largest and most complex transformations. Gate One has a comprehensive range of expertise, including operating model transformation, delivering best-in-class customer experiences, harnessing the power of technology and data, achieving value from mergers and acquisitions, and unlocking sustainability action.
Gate One’s purpose is to accelerate meaningful change for clients, colleagues and communities. Leveraging its team of experts, it collaborates closely with senior executives and managers across FTSE companies, private businesses, and major government departments to achieve exceptional results.
Background
The relationship between Gate One and the Møller Institute began via one of the Møller Institute’s Associates, Jeremy Keeley, who previously worked with Gate One’s founders. When Gate One decided the time was right to introduce a full-scale leadership programme for their extended leadership team, they approached Jeremy for advice on who might be able to deliver an engaging experience with high impact for their leaders – Jeremy made an introduction to the Møller Institute.
Gate One was looking for an executive education provider outside of London with a proven track record of delivering high-quality leadership programmes, so it felt like a natural fit.
The Møller Institute’s experience in delivering high-quality education, together with its Cambridge location, on-site learning, accommodation and catering, met all of Gate One’s requirements to bring their people together under one roof.
Gate One’s ultimate objective as a business is to differentiate itself in the market and in client delivery. The Cambridge Gate One Leadership Programme: GO Lead was therefore key.
to arming their Principals, Client Directors and Partners with new leadership skills that supported individual leadership, talent leadership and the future of the firm.
Programme Design
The Møller Institute design team always takes a collaborative and consultative approach to designing a programme. It is imperative to work closely with each client to ensure the programme is perfectly tailored to their needs, and the work with Gate One was no exception.
At the heart of the Cambridge Gate One Leadership Programme: GO Lead is a focus on leadership models and approaches, alongside exploring individual leadership styles and behaviours to support the Gate One team through their leadership journey, both individually and collectively.
Following multiple conversations with Gate One’s core design team, the programme team at the Møller Institute identified Programme Directors from the Institute’s Associate group of experts and facilitators. Together through design workshops, the teams shaped aims, learning objectives and learning outcomes that were the foundation for the whole programme. The formal design process for the whole programme examined content and structure for each individual module and its relationship to the wider programme journey, and identified a core group of relevant contributors as well as a range of delivery methods and styles.
Programme Delivery
The start of the programme asked participants to define what they wanted to achieve and to identify their ambitions for how their time at the Møller Institute would bolster their leadership toolkit for the future. Through a combination of delivery methods in both a physical and virtual setting to account for different learning styles and to generate and capture engagement across the extended leadership team over the duration of the programme. The multifaceted approach to delivery included content-led presentations by expert speakers, facilitated discussions, group exercises, psychometric assessments, individual reflection, and experiential activities.
Programme contributors over the three cohorts included Sarah David, coach and facilitator, and Adam Kingl, a Møller Institute Associate who shared his expertise on workplace culture and leadership paradigms of multigenerational organisations. The author, educator and advisor gave insight into the future of business and the requirement for innovation to adapt to the seismic shift businesses will face in the future.
Smita Elmore, a Møller Institute Associate with nearly two decades of global consultancy and coaching experience, drew on her experience in transformational change within large organisations. Topics covered by Smita included the definition and understanding of power individually and a leader’s influence within a system. Smita led discursive sessions that explored perceptions of personal influence and leadership, balanced with group activities experiencing power in action.
Other themes included followership, led by Langley Sharp OBE, a Møller Institute Associate and former Head of the Centre for Army Leadership, and collaboration, which was explored by Portia Hickey, Møller Institute Associate, through a psychometric tool.
Impact
The Gate One Lead programme with the Møller Institute created the opportunity for the business to come together across different grades of leaders. The programme has provided Gate One with new ways of working and a new language to engage with each other as leaders (e.g. their different thinking styles and behavioural preferences via the Emergenetics Profile) and with their teams (e.g. transformational conversations, using a coaching style whenever possible and ways to share feedback for sustainable behavioural change).
“We’ve all benefited from the professional, cutting-edge leadership interventions expertly delivered by the Moller Institute. The training interventions have enabled us to have more ‘transformational conversations’ with the people we lead. We often use the ‘leader as coach’ model, which we practised in a safe space at the Møller Institute. We all benefitted from understanding the value of more effective leadership and followship – we’ve been using this learning to prepare and communicate changes within our business.
Placing greater importance on ‘leader as coach’ and the value of effective followship has led to some changes in how we lead and manage our people. This has been reflected in some of our employee engagement survey scores. We’ve also used some of the learning to apply to our internal training programmes, our criteria for promotion and recruitment processes. “
– Sonia Cochet, Chief People Officer at Gate One
