Wolseley Building Services Residential

We are really happy to have just delivered our first residential Team Alignment Event following the pandemic, with the senior managers from Wolseley Building Services, as the next step in expanding the Strategic Awareness sessions that we have been delivering over the last year with their Leadership Team.

The event brought together the top two levels of the management team to spend 2.5 days in the idyllic Forest of Dean, giving them the time and space to concentrate solely on examining and improving the internal dynamics of the group. This was done using a series of fun, interactive and ever-more dynamic challenges, run alongside ‘classroom-based’ sessions to look in depth at how they work together as the senior leaders of the business and to learn new strategies for supporting each other to achieve even greater success.

Teams were constantly mixed across functions and management level, allowing everyone to get to know each other better, learn more about each other’s individual strengths and how best to utilise these within the team and also providing the opportunity to share skills and knowledge.

Every member, be it as teams of two or teams of 8, rose to each challenge we threw at them, embraced the (often random) changes within the activities and really came together to achieve the desired outcome and then review their learnings to fully understand how they could take these back into the business and apply them to the challenges they face both with their own teams and cross-functionally.

Rory Underwood, Director of Wingman said, ‘ We’ve been working with John and the WBS LT for just over a year and I’m really pleased that they decided to go ahead with the residential. The time out of the office to do this type of residential can be seen as costly, not only in monetary terms but also in the time away from the business, so we understand it is a huge commitment for anyone but the difference we say over the 2.5 days across group was incredible. Each individual fully immersed themselves in the theory, threw themselves into the outdoor challenges and the conversations on the final day proved they were going to be taking back lots of new ideas, techniques and knowledge on Monday morning.’

Everyone involved really put their all into the classroom sessions, really listening to each other, offering help and suggestions and working as a team on how they can implement what they had learnt over back in the business and with their teams.

Following the event, the delegates noted:

Nicky Thomas, Finance Director of Wolseley said, ‘The residential was a great chance for everyone involved to step away from the day-to-day running of the business and focus on the bigger picture of the business going forward and how we as a team can not only support our individual teams but also support each other. The activities and classroom sessions were a great mix, working in different teams throughout the time there helping to create aligned thinking & greater team dynamics, as well as a great platform for kick-starting  a new era within the business.’