To achieve its three-year strategy and beyond, Lion recognised the critical need to harness the power of the collective, to connect employees to a bigger purpose, and to instil a feeling of ownership and accountability for everyone’s part in creating the future story. They aimed to foster connection: within teams, throughout the organisation, as well with their customers and consumers to generate better outcomes for all. The realisation of the strategy would only come from a sustainable shift in team performance and dynamics, which meant rethinking current ways of working, being more adaptable, adopting an experimental mindset and becoming more comfortable with taking risks.

A focus on team and customer

Lion’s rich history made clear the importance of the team. In fact, they viewed the team as the fundamental unit of the organisation’s performance and the mechanism of success for this program. ‘Team’ in the sense of this program, however, spanned beyond a formal structure, into interdependent teams across the organisation. Further to this, it was critical that each of these teams were able to connect their purpose and work to the customer. Whether it was obvious (the brewery team) or obscure (finance), each team needed to create a sense of connection to the end customer.

What did we do?

Over a year, Bendelta partnered with Lion to design a highly engaging, challenging, and bespoke team experience called ‘The Impact Project (TiP)’. This experience, which focused on in-tact and interdependent teams, aligned to the three-year strategy as well as the fundamental mindsets and behaviours that Lion deemed critical for every employee. Using experiential learning, team practice, embedding techniques, practical tools, and resources, reinforcing nudges, and leader coaching, we brought this experience to life for over 156 of Lion’s teams.

The outcome

We achieved enormous progress and saw remarkable shifts resulting from TiP. Three examples of these shifts include 93% of TiP participants feeling empowered to take personal ownership for contributing to Lion’s success, 98% feeling motivated to do the right thing for the long term at Lion, and 100% feeling confident to hold themselves accountable for their commitments post program. TiP’s excellence was a recipient of Gold in the Brandon Hall awards for excellence in the Best Unique or Innovative Learning and Development Program 2023.