The Gap Partnership - Developing Global Leadership Capability

Our Work

The Gap Partnership: coaching global negotiation experts to develop their leadership capability

Background and challenge.


The Gap Partnership (TGP) is a mid-sized professional services group, leading the global negotiation consultancy market, with expertise in experiential negotiation, training, and consulting; and operating in more than 50 countries. TGP wanted to assess its current talent and leadership pipeline with a view to building on, and investing in, its future consulting capability.

With a wide variety of clients, ranging from Heineken to House of Fraser, TGP negotiators must be able to deal with a host of different sectors, businesses and people.

The style, approach and professionalism of TGP’s negotiators, coupled with their empathy and understanding of how these different businesses operate, are the company’s strength. TGP wanted to ensure it was maximising the leadership potential and flexibility of its teams.

What we did.


Working closely with TGP’s Chief People and Talent Officer, COO, and CEO, Indigogold created bespoke programmes to assess and build leadership capability across three key levels in the company.

We took a holistic approach to the requirements for each level and adapted the programmes – for business unit leaders, high potentials and executives (direct reports of the CEO and COO) – with the aim of producing sustainable and tangible outputs for the business.

During 250 coaching hours delivered over the course of 12 months, we implemented these programmes via our team of twelve Indigogold coaches across the UK, Germany, Russia, the US, Australia and China.

Each of the 36 participants undertook a 360° and a psychometric test, followed by one-on-one feedback and coaching. This was supplemented by modular work aimed at discussing specific topics tailored to each level.

For business unit leaders already heading up significantly-sized teams, we blended practical learning and coaching to develop deeper insight and capabilities to increase TGP’s management and leadership capacity.

To maximise the potential in TGP’s talent pipeline, future leaders must be equipped to tackle the complex business challenges of tomorrow. Our high potentials programme – aimed, typically, at senior individual contributors – provided a unique fusion of ‘real life’ business challenges and coaching, to accelerate their development and impact.

The leadership team’s programme focused on practicality, connecting them to commercially orientated goals. It offered immersive learning in areas such as developing coaching capability and understanding how personalities can help or hinder performance.

Results achieved.

At the end of the initial twelve months, feedback from the business was overwhelmingly positive:

 

“To hit our growth targets, we realised we needed to recruit the right new people and improve our future leadership capability and talent pipeline. The Indigogold team are doing a great job in helping us address these areas – and I’m looking forward to seeing more positive results in the future.”

Rachel Langley Chief Talent Officer

At the close of the first year of the programme:

  • 25% of the Future Leader group had been promoted.
  • 100% of participants confirmed they would recommend their programme to a colleague.
  • 92% of participants agreed they were appropriately challenged by the content.


Among other equally positive self-assessments, 95% of participants were clear on their development areas, and of those, 100% were confident in their ability to improve on these – an increase of around 35% in both measures.

After the success of year one, we continued to work with the business to support another cohort of Future Leaders and to deliver some further one-to-one development. The programmes have now been shifted internally, removing IG from the process for maximum added value. We continue to support the business as an advisory partner, building internal capability and establishing longevity for the work and its outcomes.

 

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