Future success is in the bag

Context

The Margerison-McCann Team Management Profile is playing a key role in a leadership development programme designed to help snacks producer Calbee UK hit its ambitious growth targets. Calbee UK is a small company with big ambitions. It started producing innovative savoury snacks in its factory in Deeside, North Wales, in June 2015, and its vision is to be recognised and respected as the UK’s leading savoury snacks supplier. But Calbee has deep roots. It was established in Japan in 1949 by Mr Matsuo to address post-war malnutrition in Hiroshima. With global sales of £1.2 billion and 3,300 colleagues in 12 different countries, Calbee Inc is one of the largest snack companies in the world. The UK leadership team intends to achieve its vision through earning the respect of everyone it works with, including consumers, customers & suppliers; colleagues & their families; communities; and its parent company & shareholders. Calbee UK’s values are aligned with those of its parent: we are always progressive, championing originality, in all that we do: our relationships are based on openness, trust and respect: our colleagues and their families are partners in our business: together we laugh learn and love what we do.

Challenge

Calbee UK has come a long way in a short time, as Mags Kerns, head of HR, explains: “We’ve been producing our initial brand – Yushoi, which is a good source of protein, fibre and natural ingredients such as peas and chickpeas – since 2015, and we also make own-label snacks for Aldi, Lidl and Marks & Spencer. But we’re moving into more mainstream snacking too, and in Tesco we’ve just launched two new brands that come in a range of exciting flavours – Rustiks, which is made from Russet potatoes, and Inclusions, which are popped chickpeas and include vegetables such as caramelised onions.” Calbee UK is transitioning from a start-up into a thriving SME. There are some 80 colleagues, 60 of them in the Deeside factory and 20 in the commercial office in Leeds. But while they’re all talented individuals from various food manufacturing backgrounds, they were thrown in at the deep end and had to sink or swim in an entrepreneurial pool that was unfamiliar to most of them. The success of the business so far shows they’ve passed the test with flying colours, but to proceed to the next stage, says Mags, they needed to develop and bond as a team. She explains: “We were all strangers to each other, we had no common history, and we needed to develop, grow and cohere in a way that would allow us to live our values and achieve our goals, including growing sales and market share.” With rapid and ambitious business growth plans on the agenda for 2018 and beyond, she adds, “we need to be very adaptable and flexible.”

Approach

Mags and managing director Richard Robinson created a bespoke development programme designed to increase the leadership and management capability of the senior management team and their direct reports, and they’ve partnered with leadership development expert Neil Dixon to help frame and deliver it. Neil, a long-time advocate of the Team Management Profile, felt that the Profile would be the ideal tool to help Calbee UK’s management team realise its ambitions. His plan was to get Mags and Richard to do their own Profiles before committing to a new approach. As a result, the pair were keen to explore the tool further. Mags recalls: “We both liked the format and the content of the Team Management Profile (TMP), and there was a high degree of correlation with what we ourselves felt about our own behavioural preferences. The Profile highlights strengths and development needs, it’s easy to complete and understand and, as we came to use it more with the team, we saw the wide and deep applications it has – the more you delve into the results, the more you discover.” Neil started working with Calbee UK in earnest in November 2017, since when the Team Management Profile has “run like a red thread through the programme,” he says. The initial idea was to run separate sessions for Richard and his five direct reports, and the 20-strong management team, but in keeping with the flat structure of the business (“there’s no hierarchy,” says Mags), they decided instead to work mainly with a single cohort in order to strengthen relationships among the wider team and avoid any sense of ‘them and us’. The first event was a two-day offsite meeting for the whole team. The first day focused on leadership and team working, and Neil introduced people to Margerison-McCann’s High Energy Teams Model, which gave them a structure to keep them on track. The second day was devoted largely to the Team Management Profile: the team were given their reports, and Neil led a series of exercises designed to show people how their roles on the Team Management Wheel had a bearing on their work preferences and relationships with colleagues. Those feedback sessions were ‘two-to-ones’, comprising Neil, the individual and their line manager. This format allowed the open and honest conversations around the individual’s Profile to develop into performance discussions. “People would summarise their strengths and areas for development, and this led to a really rich discussion about their accountabilities, core objectives and wider contribution to Calbee UK outside their functional specialism,” says Neil. “This, in turn, led to a development plan.”

Outcome

People’s combined preferences as revealed by their Profiles were mapped onto a Dynamic Team Map. Some 14% of the combined senior management and management team were Explorer-Promoters, 20% were Assessor-Developers, 19% Thruster-Organisers, 15% Concluder-Producers, 10% Controller-Inspectors, 5% Upholder-Maintainers, 6% Reporter-Advisers and 11% Creator-Innovators. Mags notes: “It was interesting, but not surprising, to see the balance of roles. When you’re starting a new business Assessor-Developers and Thruster-Organisers are just the kind of people you need. Now the business has arrived at its current stage, we need more emphasis on Controller-Inspectors and Upholder-Maintainers – and it just so happens that our two most recent recruits fall into those two categories.” The beauty of the Team Management Profile is that it allows people to not only understand themselves better but also their colleagues, an understanding that facilitates better relationships. Exercises focusing on where people fell on four scales – Extrovert-Introvert; Practical-Creative; Analytical-Beliefs; and Structured-Flexible – were “really powerful,” says Neil, “because they showed people how they might need to adapt their approach to get through to someone at the other end of the scale.” Mags describes the development programme as “a continuous adventure, with milestones along the way.” There is “no endpoint,” she says. “But we’re doing very well. We’re happy and proud to have got as far as we have in such a short time. I can’t attribute it all to the Team Management Profile, of course, but it’s a very useful addition to our toolbox. We are definitely working better and more closely as a team, and we’ve got to this point quicker than we would have done otherwise. The work we’re doing with Neil, including the Profile work, has accelerated our progress.”