Since it was founded 22 years ago, Virgin Atlantic Airways has become Britain’s second largest airline, serving the world’s major cities. With 36 aircraft, 9,000 staff and over 4.5 million passengers a year, it is one of the world’s leading airlines.
It also represents the quintessential Virgin success story: the challenger brand taking on established industry leaders by introducing better service for passengers combined with a reputation for innovative product development.
The challenge
Virgin Atlantic was growing rapidly following the market crash that came in the wake of 9/11. It also enjoyed strong brand recognition that resonated with innovation and value. However, the management team, although enthusiastic, needed to develop their skills and experience as leaders. Moreover, a reliance on external recruitment had diluted the ‘vibe’ of the workplace.
Virgin Atlantic’s Executive Team identified the need to create a ‘team and a half ’ at the top: a strong leadership team to lighten the load for Directors and respond quickly to new business opportunities. This team of champions would be based on growing excellence from within rather than external recruitment.
The leadership development programme needed to be built around the stated business manifesto “to grow a profitable airline which people love to fly and where people love to work” and a specific challenge of 7% return on sales.
The leadership team began by identifying which traits made the company historically successful, thus enabling them to ascertain what Virgin Atlantic needed in order to guarantee future success and the traits that would drive the change in the way they operate. From this, a leadership profile was developed, encapsulated by six principles:
- Focus aggressively on profit
- Be bold and adventurous
- Deliver the basics, brilliantly
- Add magic touches
- Inspire and engage your people
- Ensure great people can do great work
“These principles formed the foundation of what we wanted to achieve and were linked to broader business strategy. The programme absolutely had to be tied to commercial objectives as it was important that it wasn’t seen as just another ‘HR initiative’,” explains Andy Cross, Virgin’s Head of Learning and Development. “It was also crucial that people understood that this was a developmental programme and not an assessment – particularly as it began with a 360 degree appraisal.”
Meeting the challenge: a partnership approach
Having painted a picture of what great leadership would look like at Virgin Atlantic, Andy set about making it a reality. He wanted to partner with an organisation that could support and facilitate the transformation of senior managers. After evaluating several professional development bodies, he selected Roffey Park to help develop and deliver Virgin Atlantic’s programme. “Roffey Park was the natural choice for us,” continues Andy. “The team was creative but challenging – they were never afraid to build a suggestion and come up with different solutions. The level of flexibility and customisation was also critical in our decision. Furthermore, the Roffey Park facilities and ethos reflected a lot of what we consider to be Virgin Atlantic values.”
The Roffey Park team spent a considerable amount of time with Andy understanding the unique challenges facing Virgin Atlantic. As Andy is eager to emphasise, the relationship was very much collaborative rather than prescriptive: “Their team felt like an extension of my own. This helped us get off to a flying start.”
The programme: Leadership Development Workshop Over eighty managers took part in a series of personal development workshops, each two and half days in length. The workshops began with individual coaching sessions that set personal development objectives based on their 360 degree feedback, personality inventory and a start point grounded in performance and challenges at work. This was followed by a series of experiential development activities designed to embed Virgin’s leadership principles in management behaviour. Particular emphasis was placed on specific challenges with the airline.
Strategy into action, cross-functional awareness and difficult performance situations were the focus of three workshop sessions. These were followed with self-assessment, coach and buddy feedback and additional one-to-one coaching sessions that helped monitor progress.
When the workshops were completed, participants produced a personal leadership development plan and then split into two learning sets that met a further six times over the course of nine months, three of which were facilitated by Roffey Park coaches. These allowed the participants to support and challenge each other while monitoring their own progress against their plans. The groups were also mixed by department to allow crossfunction collaboration. This was essential in embedding the learning back into the organisation.
The results
Andy has been delighted with the results so far: “I have had some participants tell me it has changed their lives and increased their effectiveness significantly. One participant was able to use the skills he had learnt to negotiate a £140,000 reduction in a contract thanks to the collaboration in the learning sets.”
“The programme has also had a positive impact on retention with the leadership team,” adds Andy. “We’ve increased retention rates at managerial level as well as achieving a stronger balance between internal and external recruitment.”
Andy concludes, “Looking to the future, our focus is to deliver focused development activities to the leadership team and extend the leadership development programme to a wider group. To achieve this we will be profiling the potential of our leaders and introducing local talent forums in each key area of the business.”