Sainsbury's began its leadership programme in October 2004 after the board developed a set of values that it thought would help the company achieve its goals. The six values that emerged were:
Individual responsibility, but team delivery
Treat every pound as your own
Great service drives sales
Respect for the individual
Getting better every day
Keep it simple.
Sainsbury's worked with business psychologist Gurnek Bains, of consultancy YSC, on the development of these goals and values.
Straight away, the HR team undertook a major communications exercise to spread these values throughout the business. This involved tweaking the company's staff opinion survey to include the values and embedding them into the performance management process. However, the team quickly realised that the company's leaders needed a clearer definition of what it meant to lead through these values. So, Breeze called in Bains again and they began the next stage of the leadership programme.
Bains and the Sainsbury's board decided it would help to come up with leadership 'behaviours' to help the retailer achieve its values and goals. After brainstorming, they came up with six: winning, tough love, commitment is earned, on my watch, try something new, and customers pay our wages.
"The behaviours are written in clear language that will mean something to all our leaders," explains Breeze. "While our values are unlikely to change, these behaviours are what we need now, so may change in the future."
To help staff get to know these behaviours, Breeze's team organised a two-day programme for the retailer's top 1,000 leaders. These were store managers and above, who attended one of 35 events held over three months at the leisure resort chain Center Parcs.
Sainsbury's used YSC and HR consultancy Lane 4 to help design and implement the programme, but much of the facilitation work was done in-house, by about 50 of Sainsbury's senior managers. The events involved 360-degree feedback and role plays based both in the business and out of it. A board director was present at every
