Nestle

Adeline Looi

We all know that a team of champions is not the same as a championship team. Individual contributors who are superstars in their own right may not necessarily get well with optimal team dynamics and achieve team performance together.  

Today’s reality in many organizations is that employees are part of more than one intact team. They have cross-functional teams, matrix teams, and agile teams overlaying the regular teams, just to name a few. And in each of these, the individual employees that come together, bring with them a diversity of skills and strengths that has the potential of causing the team to be greater than the sum of its parts. In essence, they are able to function effectively together as one.

Yet, very often, we focus so much time, effort, and resources on individual upskilling but not the same investments are given to intact team development and effectiveness in learning and development.

I think it is because it’s always easier to focus on developing one person. There are some dimensions of strengths, gaps, and motivations to think of. But when we think about teams, it suddenly becomes so convoluted as each interaction among the team members could bring about more uncertainty and is way harder to predict. So as HR professionals, we end up focusing on the part we can predict and (we think we can) control.

At Nestlé, we have over 30,000 people leaders and 270,000 full-time employees all around the world. Hence, you can only imagine the number of teams that are spread geographically across lines of businesses and functions. And if we can crack this element of developing team effectiveness, we know that we would be able to leverage this team engagement to achieve our business goals far greater than we could originally do with just individual superstars.

So, being clear that leadership and culture have a significant impact on employee engagement and motivation to strive further, we included this key element as one of the three pillars of our People 2025 Roadmap. Working with markets in a bottoms-up approach, and across multiple sprints, we introduced a framework for integrated leadership development that is focused on inspiring and inclusive leadership, even in disruptive times. And at the global level, we provided flexibility and freedom within the frame for regions, markets, and individual businesses to leverage that so they had the autonomy to customize individual and team leadership development to their local context.

 " We focus so much time, effort, and resources on individual upskilling but not the same investments are given to intact team development and effectiveness in learning and development "

 In order to drive personalization of development at the level of teams, it starts with an individual and (thereafter, collating to a) team assessment, which provides the insight and ‘a-ha’ so that this triggers the real issue and surfaces. This helps to create the platform for psychological safety; the freedom and extent to which employees feel safe to speak up, take risks, and be themselves without fear of negative consequences. We have seen this greatly increase the sense of belonging within teams (even with extremely diverse, virtual, or even hybrid teams) and the culture of daring to speak up and test-and-learn new approaches. Not surprisingly, the team engagement and culture also improved. When employees feel psychologically safe, they are more likely to engage in open communication, share their thoughts and ideas, and collaborate with their team members. This, in turn, led to improved problem-solving, increased innovation, and stronger team relationships.

The team then decides what they will undertake within their team journey, selecting challenging and immersive learning experiences, and coupling them with bite-sized learning resources, in the flow of work. In the past, this would have been accomplished with the support of one of our internal team coaches within our Nestlé Coaching Network, who would follow the intact team’s journey for the next 12 months. But as the positive feedback got out, the demands exceeded our supply of internal coaches by more than 10x! So we knew we needed to tap on multiple deployment methods.

One of those that we used was a team coaching and enablement platform, which is powered by artificial intelligence. The technology did not replace the team leader, but it provided her with insights and the team with nudges to continually improve. Over time, we say that it helped the team align on where they were and to build foundations of core trust and openness, and then, steering them towards a contracted way of working that drove excellence and built team effectiveness. Starting with a pilot of 250 people across all five regions around the world, this proof of concept snowballed to over 3000 in less than a year. And in 2023, we are now ready and are scaling this across Nestlé globally and I am so excited to see the results that it will bring, not just in teams being developed, but also in measuring the impact of these engaged teams on total business results.

Now, that is putting money where the mouth is.