Bringing transformation to organisations and people – client perspectives

Client feedback from Louise McKenzie, John Crossan and William Easmon

What Our Clients Say 

Lumina Learning’s products are very customisable and can be used for different solutions in different organisations. There’s a lot of flexibility in the Lumina Learning tools to hopefully be able to support every organisation. But how do we actually bring transformation to organisations and people? Hear what some of our clients have to say:

Louise McKenzie

Director of Workforce Transformation at a National Health Service Foundation Trust in Surrey

“We were first introduced to Lumina Learning in 2014. We were appointing a new chief executive, and we wanted to find an assessment tool that would enable us to assess our candidates against the values of the organisation and the behaviours that we were trying to role model. So, I was introduced to Lumina Learning, and we looked at how we might set up a profile on Lumina Select and do a process of mapping our candidates against that. And it became really obvious early on that actually there was no point in us just assessing the candidates against one another, but we also needed to assess them against the board. Because we needed to first of all understand the working styles of the current board members, and then how those candidates would fit with the board. So what started as a small(ish) recruitment exercise ended up in a wholesale – both recruitment of a chief executive, and then a board development programme that underpinned that appointment by looking at the board members and using Lumina Spark to help understand a bit more about how we worked. That was in 2014, and since then our journey has continued.

“One of the most transformative areas for us is using Lumina Learning for recruiting our consultants, so our senior doctors. When you’re appointing a consultant to an organisation, you’re not appointing them to a job, you’re appointing them for 20+ years. So they are very important decisions that you’re making. We were noticing that we were asking questions in the interview around our values but we weren’t really able to test or understand them in a lot of detail. So I spent some time with Lumina Learning thinking about how we might develop a shortened version of the Lumina Spark, and that was the one-page Lumina Select. The CEO and I spent some time thinking about what the leadership attributes are that we’re looking for from these consultants, and how do we assess them using the Lumina tool. And we created a one-side summary that we now use with every single consultant appointment panel. So I would estimate I employ about 400 consultants, and we probably have between 15% and 20% of them that now have a Lumina profile, that have been through an interview where we’ve asked them questions relating to their profile, and then once they’re appointed I do a coaching session with them, which is a fantastic way to meet the new consultants on a one-to-one basis.”

John Crossan

Learning and Development Partner at NG Bailey

“I’m responsible for our leadership and management qualifications and also for our talent development initiative. We’re talking there about the identification, assessment, and development of our real high potential people. And we’ve been integrating Lumina Learning into those programmes for the last couple of years with some really interesting results. When I joined the business, our talent programmes first and foremost were about developing our leaders of the future, but we hadn’t asked the question: what do our leaders in the next three, five, ten years need to have, need to do, need to be? And that’s where we’ve been able to work with Lumina Learning. We’ve been working with our senior leadership teams to identify the Competencies that we think leaders will need in our business going forward. And then partnering with Lumina Learning to identify the Qualities from Lumina Spark and Lumina Emotion that would say ‘do you know what, this person’s kind of naturally predisposed to doing that stuff’?

“Previously, we weren’t assessing potential, we were actually assessing performance. What we’ve been able to do with Lumina Learning is put together a bespoke solution that helps us to actually assess potential. So, for our talent development programmes going forward, we’ll be able to assess from Lumina Spark and Lumina Emotion’s perspective, who’s got the traits and who’s got the emotional intelligence stuff underpinning all of that to occupy a senior leadership position in our business in the future? Because we recognise we need to make that shift. I think one of the biggest values Lumina Learning brings is helping us make that transition from just identifying and assessing people based on performance to really looking underneath the skin of that and saying okay, but what’s this person’s potential for more? The big thing for me is having something Evidence-based that can tell us based on people’s predispositions – based on their natural traits, based on how likely they are to overextend some of those strengths, and what the absence of certain Qualities means – this is how people stack up compared to what we think we need from our leaders going forward.”

William Easmon

HR Director at Barclays Bank Ghana

“When I joined the organisation, it was structured, tough, competitive, about objectives and meeting targets. And so the empathy, the People Focused bit wasn’t there. And I noticed that we had very strong managers, but not enough leaders. So, I was looking around at how we can change this culture.

“So, I got introduced to Lumina Learning and Joy and Atiya’s Leadership Unleashed programme. I have a personal policy where for most leadership programmes I need to go and test and make sure it is worth bringing it into the organisation. Then I defend and make a case before the board. So, I went through it and I was like ‘wow, this is what we need in this organisation’. Self-awareness basically. And for colleagues to know the value of the people bit, being a bit more Flexible, being a bit more Spontaneous, being People Focused, Collaborative, rather than Competitive. So, we started on a journey of taking our middle managers and senior leaders through the Leadership Unleashed programme. We’re in our third year now, and the results are phenomenal. Engagement levels are now up. The last time we did a survey, engagement levels moved from 62% to 84% as of this year. Retention has risen to almost 98%. In fact, when I joined the organisation turnover was between 7% and 10%. Last year, turnover was 3.2%, because basically, we are bringing human back into the organisation. Colleagues are now understanding who they are, where their strengths are, when they need to tune down and where they need to tune up, especially at a managerial level. And this has created a lot more engagement in the organisation. And for me it’s been a great journey. And it’s a journey we will continue to embark on as we go along throughout the years. Our relationship with Lumina Learning is set, ready, and we are not going back on this.”

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You can watch our panel discussion on organisational transformation with Louise McKenzie, William Easmon, and John Crossan here.