Background
Sky is Europe’s leading entertainment company, with 31,000+ employees serving 23 million customers across 7 countries. Until 12 months ago, Sky Leeds was purely an outsourced customer service site, with a pervasive negative culture and a lack of stable leadership. Their challenge was to transform a long-lasting toxic culture into one characterised by strong leadership aligned with Sky’s values and ambitious business targets.
"Transforming a long-lasting toxic culture into one characterised by strong leadership"
Approach
With the help of Tao Leadership, Sky Leeds undertook a leadership development programme to train advisors from a customer service environment to a sales retention and sales product attachment space. A unique 3-step methodology was employed, with a focus on analysis of the organisational network to identify influencers, listening to the needs
of the people and the business, and sprinting towards the new culture with an agile mindset.
Critical to the growth and thinking of leaders was an emphasis on inputs, and how these in turn drive KPI outputs. This was a shift from previous attitudes that prioritised numbers above investing in people. There was also a dramatic shift in the amount of time employees spent with their team leaders – from 20 to 85%.
Outcome
Tao reinforced the grow coaching model, facilitating role play for leaders to practise coaching. They also focused on demonstrating how to use positive feedback to guide behaviours and favourable outcomes. The final piece of the transformation puzzle was a full site move, with a new building complementing a fresh mindset. This was fully engaged with, with mood boards, photos and videos shared along the way.
These efforts have resulted in a staggering 26-point movement in people engagement from 55 to 81, accompanied by significant improvement in commercial performance, NPS and productivity. Tao Leadership’s partnership with Sky Leeds has shown that placing people at the forefront of strategy can deliver incredible results.