Parker Hannifin
Development centres
Situation
Parker Hannifin was keen to introduce a European management development program to foster the development of leadership skills and to facilitate the adoption of common Parker cultural values across the organisation while at the same time developing awareness of cross cultural managerial differences.
Solution
Working closely with the European Management Development Manager and his colleagues, we interviewed a variety of managers across Parker's European operations to identify key leadership issues, competency profiles and development needs.
We then designed three workshops, each of one week's duration, and a series of on the job action learning projects. The first of the workshops was a unique diagnostic process that we had used with several other organisations and which had proved to be highly successful.
It worked on the assumption that self insight is one of the most powerful learning tools available and took the form of an assessment centre with no external assessors present. The participants themselves were trained to serve as the assessors and provide feedback to each other after viewing video records, listening to audio tapes and evaluating written documentation they had each produced in the course of doing the assessment centre tasks.
Outcome
Participants had a very high sense of ownership of their results and fully understood the behaviours that had lead to their diagnosis of strengths and development needs.
This created strong motivation to find ways of building on strengths and addressing development needs and the perfect starting point for the rest of the management development program.
We conducted train the trainer sessions to enable members of the Parker European Training function to role out the program across the company's various European locations.