The Tradedoubler Leadership Academy
We launched our first management program called the “Tradedoubler Leadership Academy” on April 2018 at our UK office, with the aim of inspiring, motivating and supporting senior managers and directors in the development of leadership and management skills, style and approach to effectively manage their teams achieving business, departmental and individual objectives.
With the constant changes faced in the digital market and in the workforce, managers need to keep up with techniques, tools and management methods to adapt to nowadays diversity and different skill sets that employees have. With this program, all UK line managers at Tradedoubler are improving their competencies and empowering their team members, ensuring that we meet development and performance standards which would positively impact the service that we deliver to our clients. We believe that happy employees convert into happy clients!
Mouna Laagarat, Senior Client Development Manager, is one of the delegates in this programme. She explained: “All corporations would agree that the best resource for a company is their people. The Leadership Academy is designed to help us nurture and grow our people as a team and as individuals. Extending some modules to the rest of the team when relevant has strengthened the bond between us and I’m loving it. There’s nothing better than seeing a team happy and satisfied after they’ve learned something new!”
As we look beyond management towards leadership, the program is designed to support delegates to deal with change, not only react to it but take a strategic mindset predicting trends and navigating challenges. The program is divided into 10 modules covering different abilities, models and resources such as coaching, mentoring, NLP, inspirational leadership, situational leadership, employee development and performance management; covering all aspects and competencies of a successful leader.
As Tradedoubler’s Talent and Development Manager, I worked closely with an external partner to understand the training needs, utilising a multi-source pre-assessment and cohort meetings, and designed the programme to achieve current management and company goals. The training’s setting for the Leadership Academy is practical, tailored to Tradedoubler and oriented to behavioural change, accompanied by other development processes such as 360-degree feedback reviews which allow managers to lead and monitor their progression.
Since the programme started, managers are mastering many of the tools and applying the methods in daily interactions with their teams, showing the expected improvement in their skills and leading their teams with the required support and direction. The Academy has also encouraged cohesiveness in the management team which has impacted Tradedoubler’s internal strategy for the second and third quarter’s of the year and the overall perception of the business.
Our strategy director and participant in the course, Franck Georget said “The management program has helped me to develop my team and address performance challenges, improving their partnership management skills and efficiency in general. It gave me a better understanding to spot areas of improvement in my management style and the team. The course provided me with a broad notion to structure my communication and how to apply that on a daily basis into different situations, helping me to have a clearer direction and to align it successfully with the team needs. After 5 months, I understand the team members better and each personality, I’m able to adapt to them and have realistic expectations, making it easier to develop them and to identify upcoming potential issues.”
Antoine Gaborieau, Client Development Director and delegate, added “Tradedoubler is evolving in a fast-paced industry where client management is key to deliver the best in class service and strategy to achieve outstanding performance for our clients. Tradedoubler’s top management understands that they need to empower employees to achieve results by giving support and direction, tailored to each of them to reach our goals as “one team”. The management training offers a wide range of workshops going from key principles of people management to a more deep understanding of how to coach employees to get the most of them. Those trainings allow Tradedoubler’s managers to have employee-centric approach and adapt management based on each individual”
In the human resources department, we will continue to design this type of development initiatives and remain creating opportunities for line managers to grow their leadership skills and to ensure that the talent agenda exceed expectations when facing upcoming challenges. We look forward to seeing the outcome after the programme is completed by all participants, with the end goal of increasing people strategy transformation, innovation, effective ways of people problem-solving and motivating members of the team, all which would help us, as a technology leading company, to adapt to new management concepts, placing the emphasis in our current leaders.
Chris Russell-Smith, our Country Manager concluded: “As an organisation, we can only be as good as our people, and therefore investments like this are important not only to ensure their ongoing development but also the development of our working culture. Well trained managers mean the whole company is better equipped. I have been delighted with the management course we have run this year. It has covered some difficult but very important subjects and being spread regularly over the year, has provided a framework for reinforcement and people success.”
The author:
Dalis is a CIPD qualified HR professional with 6 years’ experience in talent management and development, as well as other key areas of human resources such as employee engagement, change management and employee relations, who took over an exciting new role at Tradedoubler at the end of last year with the objective of attracting, selecting, retaining and developing the best talent for the business, driving the HR agenda to achieve company’s objectives.
