Nursery Kitchen is a family owned, Founder led business that is experiencing huge growth in the Early Years food sector. They provide healthy meals to nurseries to feed their small and precious customers! When we started partnering with NK in 2020 the business was transitioning from a small to medium organisation. We love working with NK and now understand their business inside out, this helps us operate like an insider but still bringing all our external knowledge to help them solve their challenges right.
x
Partnership
Read on for more on how we worked together…
Nursery Kitchen were in a period of high growth, their Leadership team were each very passionate about their department but operating in silos and communication was all going through the Founder. It was identified that everyone was working to a slightly different goal and their individual ideas of what success looked like were slightly different.
We were initially instructed for 1:1 coaching, working individually with each of the lead team. We developed self awareness and focussed on individual development. We then took our learnings into the team coaching sessions…
We used various methods to unearth challenges and overcome them, develop communication and relationships and improve team effectiveness. We worked together on aligning the lead team, and then launched a company wide culture project to articulate it in a way that spoke to everyone at NK.
Coach Mentoring
The Head of People has coaching with Jess. In this slightly unique coaching relationship Jess gets to wear 2 hats. 1 as a coach, supporting Nina through decision making and her personal development, and one as mentor - discussing the people strategy and how to develop and execute it.
"A rapid stage of growth and development at Nursery Kitchen had put pressure on some of the relationships in our leadership team. Jess’s individual coaching with each team member and our group strategy sessions helped us to focus on valuing and sharing each other’s strengths. This helped develop the trust and openness we needed to perform exceptionally well as a team.”
CEO, Nursery Kitchen
Culture Evolution; Purpose, Vision & Values
Through a series of workshops, interviews and surveys we pulled a purpose, vision and values from the team and rolled them out across the organisation. Through partnering with the CPO on her strategy, these collective cultural commitments are signed up to by everyone, and everyone understands the part they play in success. They are woven through the whole employee lifecycle with NK now hiring on values, training them into the team and performance managing against them.
Once the lead team were aligned, we then needed to ensure the rest of the company could see the culture and direction of travel were being articulated in a way that spoke to them.
Throughout this period of high growth NK introduced a new organisational structure and with increasing number of internal promotions coming up through the ranks they needed to teach essential management skills to first time managers.
Thrive; Management Skills programme
We co-designed a programme to teach essential management skills to first time managers. The course builds self awareness, reflects on leadership styles and builds skills in tricky areas such as performance management, dealing with conflict and difficult conversations. Bringing consistency to the way the team leads, and overcoming challenges and barriers to top performance along the way.
INSIGHTS Psychometric Profiling, Workshop & Coaching
We have been using INSIGHTs Discovery (a psychometric tool) initially for each of the lead team. Their profiles enabled the team to see the differing personalities and open discussion about how they worked together. We ran workshops firstly on teamwork and communication and then later on team effectiveness and impact. The workshops highlighted ways to better connect and communicate, developed self awareness and clearly showed where the team skills were lacking to drive the results they wanted. INSIGHTs has been instrumental in NK’s leadership and growth. Due to the great success at this level, NK have invested in a profile and a one off 1:1 coaching session for each newcomer to the business. Profiles are shared across the team enabling them to get to know one another, their ways of working and their communication preferences quickly. Insights is now a language that is used across the whole organisation.
In our team coaching with the lead team, they expressed the wish to continue to learn how to better connect and communicate with one another throughout the company.
