Building a leadership cadre in an international retailer

Client: An international retail organisation
The challenge: To develop the top 50 in an organisation of 180,000

The client

Ahold is an international retail organisation, headquartered in the Netherlands, that operates several different retail brands. It employs 180,000 people in 8 countries on two continents and turns over more than £25 billion per year. In 2008/9 a new leadership team of the company had steered a difficult course to recovery after a serious collapse of the share price and now wanted to draw together the top leadership of the subsidiary companies into a single leadership cadre for the group as a whole.

Edgecumbe’s contribution

Edgecumbe was asked to lead on this initiative working closely with the CEO and top team. We conducted executive development assessments for each of the top 50 executives including the CEO and fed back their results and implications for their personal development.

We conducted workshops for each of the leadership teams that helped them focus on their shared aims for the next 3 to 5 years and what they needed to do to make these more likely to be achieved.

We also worked with Oxford Saïd and Harvard Business Schools to create two leadership development modules of executive education which the top 50 executives attended and evaluated extremely positively.

The outcome

The result is a single leadership cadre for the entire company that thinks and acts more in concert and thereby enables the organisation to develop end implement strategy more effectively. There has since been significant organisational changes and senior executive moves between countries that have taken place and the group continues to thrive.