Leading through change means leading more frequently
Schibsted Marketing Services is responsible for selling ad solutions for the entire Schibsted media house. An increasingly complex market and challenges like GDPR has led to major changes for the organization and the business. In order to succeed with the transformation taking place, and to lead both teams and individuals through the changes, the Swedish part of the organisation had decided to invest in leadership training for all of its leaders.
The challenge and the mission
- Managing several change processes, including reorganization, new senior management, customer segmenting, and ways of working.
- All leaders are expected to lead their teams and colleagues through the changes and to maintain the high engagement levels that exists today.
- The leaders are also affected by the changes themselves and need support and tools for their mission.
- The goal is to maintain a positive development of the organization’s engagement index.
”We have set a new direction and a new strategy – and now it’s up to us what we will achieve in 2020 and onwards. It’s absolutely essential that we in our roles as leaders are continuously challenging and developing ourselves, and practicing active leadership”, says Joakim Flodin, Managing Director of Schibsted Marketing Services Sweden.
Leadership Training with Yomento
Schibsted Marketing Services chose to collaborate with Yomento in order to help the organization’s leaders to lead their teams effectively through these times of change. Yomento’s solution has been designed to inspire and support leaders to practice their leadership each day, thus creating better conditions for teams and organizations to reach their goals together.
“What change management means, in short, is that leadership must be practiced more often. More frequent leadership is needed! How we deal with change is very individual, and leaders often need help to understand what leadership behaviors that are most important in various phases of the change process,” says Tom Hammar, Head of Leadership Development at Yomento.
The training journey with Yomento includes:
- A joint kickoff for all leaders with focus on Change Management
- Individual training goals for each leader
- Regular team meetings and leadership forums to share learnings and discuss training
- Continuous training reports to follow up on training efforts and to inspire leaders to continue their training
Management can easily access aggregated training data, and get insights in what leaders are practicing, how often they practice, and how they feel that they are developing. As a sales organization, the company culture is naturally competitive, and ranking different parts of the organization against each other pushes teams to train even more often. Also, the journey will end with a Training Award.
An important element for the workplace culture
For HR manager Nina Hermansen, it was a given that all leaders should participate in the initiative. The leaders are subjected to many and high expectations and it was important to offer the leaders a tool to support them in leading their teams through change, and also to support their own development.
“I want our leaders to feel that we, as an employer, are truly committed to support them in their important roles. Therefore, it is important to me that I can follow both their progress and how they themselves experience the leadership training with Yomento”
Nina Hermansen, HR Manager
Schibsted Marketing Services has also initiated work on their workplace culture, and Nina Hermansen sees the Yomento training as an essential part of developing and strengthening the desired culture.
Anna Kempe, Head of Customer Success at Yomento, agrees: “It is powerful for the workplace culture when all leaders are encouraged to practice behaviors directly linked to team’s performance and well-being. And as always, for new behaviors to stick and become new habits, there must be role-models around you who are practicing the behaviors you are asked to practice.”
