Investing in future leaders: Inside Beyond’s Leadership Development Program

One of the many things the pandemic highlighted was the importance of employee experience. As a business, we help many of our clients improve their employee experience in a multitude of ways: designing and developing more connected and functional internal tools, strategizing ways in which brands can increase internal pride and engagement, and creating more engaging and effective learning experiences. In 2021, with “the great resignation” upon us, we as a leadership team realized the need to shift our focus on our own employee experience, evaluating ways in which we could better support and engage our now remote-first workforce.

At the time, our learning and development offering was sporadic. We would support individual requests, but learning was not meaningfully linked to key objectives like career progression or planned skills development.  We wanted to be more strategic, more intentional, and more effective. 

Our ‘high dream’ was to become an organisation that supports, empowers, challenges and enables our people to succeed at the highest level. In so doing, this would drive performance across the business, focusing on an important strategic area with each cohort. 

We chose to focus on women in leadership in the first cohort. Why?

Beyond is committed to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, and has been well recognised for it, including winning the Sunday Times Top 100 Best Places to Work in 2018, in our category. Women are one third of our workforce, yet are not as evenly represented on our leadership teams. By investing more in the female workforce, we expected to see more women excelling in leadership roles, client work and high profile projects, increasing equity and representation across our business.

What did we do and how did it go?

We designed a programme with three strands: group ‘deep dives’ on leadership theory; personal development through 1-1 coaching; and internal initiatives relevant to Beyond that participants identified as crucial to our business. 

As important as personal development is, we wanted to link the programme explicitly to the development of the business too. We wanted to embody the “make it better” spirit of Beyond and encourage participants to identify areas of the business where they could take ownership and make their mark.

This is an interesting question, particularly where women are concerned. As McKinsey research attests ‘the most valuable lessons of women’s leadership programs are those that show organizations where to improve’, by holding a mirror up to the organization.

This third area of the programme was really important to us. A 6-9 month leadership programme should have direct business impact. Through the application process, we invited women to identify an area of the business they felt needed improvement, and to scope out how they would work through the programme to advance change. 

We went through a thorough process to find our programme partner, securing Overtime Leader to co-design and deliver the programme with us –they have been an excellent partner. Learn more on their approach here. 

The programme ran from May to December 2021. We noticed greater organizational cohesiveness and more assertive conversations, including in salary negotiations (possibly the most important factor in closing the gender pay gap). We noticed an uplift in motivation, with people stepping up in their roles and taking on more responsibility with more confidence. Since then, two female leaders joined the leadership team in Europe, and two female leaders received promotions. 

The business change projects took more time. We learnt we needed to support these projects better to embed them into the organization. Despite that, we have seen the deepening of our innovation practice, the introduction of service design, furthering of our Diversity Driven Design & Development methodology, better practice on hiring more female engineers, developing retros, strengthening our global delivery practice and improving our company rituals and how we approach remote working as a result of the programme. 

Our goal was to ‘support, empower, challenge and enable our people to succeed at the highest level’. For some graduates of the program, that meant promotions, more responsibilities, more ownership of key programs. For others, that meant aspiring to new opportunities outside of Beyond; since the program’s completion, some participants have left for new opportunities at Meta, Google, and Nike. We celebrate both as successful outcomes, and have seen first hand as a leadership team the power and impact of a sound employee experience strategy and a strategic learning and development approach. 

Our 2022 programme with Overtime Leaders is currently underway, focused on a cohort of our senior creative and technology leaders.