We have been conducting international leadership seminars for SEW, a leading company in drive technology, for a number of years. To find out more about our cooperation with this client, and the steps of internationalisation of their Human Resource Development, please read further.
A central feature of our company is the constant progression of our Human Resources Development work. This is why we founded the ‘Drive Academy’. CONTRACT’s creative and pragmatic way of working goes very well with our philosophy.
Johannes Beck, Director Drive Academy, SEW Eurodrive
Would you have thought that managers from different European countries based in unequal cultures often have the same problems? …that learning in an international group can make it easier to speak about something personal regarding ones own leadership? Or that role plays conducted in a foreign language can be just as successfuland beneficial for learners as in one’s mother tongue? …these are only some of the things we realised and learned when conducting seminars all over Europe for one of our clients.
SEW Eurodrive, an internationally operating family-owned business with over 11,000 employees and assembly plants in 44 countries, is one of the leading companies in drive technology – but has been a ‘hidden champion‘ from the start. SEW’s headquarters are around the corner from CONTRACT, in Bruchsal, which is where our work with SEW started almost 10 years ago.
In 1998 we developed and started conducting leadership development seminars for the managers of SEW. Even though SEW was already working internationally, we first concentrated on working with the managers from the headquarters, and offered leadership trainings in German. The second step in our cooperation with SEW was working with managers from other European branches, who were invited to participate in leadership seminars (held in English) directly at the Drive Academy in Bruchsal. Our aim was to equip participants with leadership tools as well as international competence: We knew they were used to discussing technical details with each other. But what do you do when a Swedish employee explains something in a completely different way to a Portuguese, and it is causing difficulty? We believe that a certain ‘language’ is needed to bring up these differences and to resolve them. We wanted to equip the SEW managers with this ‘language’,as well as the skills to address intercultural differences.
With the introduction of the Euro in 2002, it became clear that managers would increasingly work within the European network and play a stronger role in the new single European market. This was the starting point for SEW and CONTRACT to launch the third step: seminars for managers solely from outside of Germany. We pursued two goals with these seminars – on the one hand, we wanted to equip SEW managers outside of Germany with the same skills, competencies and understanding of leadership as the managers at the headquarters. On the other hand, we aimed to develop and strengthen the network between the managers.
So far, we have conducted trainings in the Czech Republic, in Switzerland, in Poland,Sweden and Belgium – managers from all over Europe travelled to the respective location, met other European managers, and had the opportunity to see other offices and assembly plants of SEW.
The leadership seminars have several modules, and participants go through a seminar cycle together. 8-12 participants learn about communication, leadership methods, team and personal development within a European context. They exchange best practices, discuss different work scenarios, strengthen their network and increase their knowledge regarding the treatment of strategic clients. The seminars are held by an in-house trainer from SEW in cooperation with a CONTRACT trainer – which has proven to be a great success.
In 2007, we are moving into yet another phase – seminars in English for both managers from Germany and Europe, in either Germany or a European country. Going through this process with SEW has been a typical process of internationalisation – first training German managers in Germany, then inviting other European managers to participate in the seminars in Germany, subsequently training European managers all over Europe, and eventually training all managers (German and other European) in Europe! Today, German managers use the same leadership tools as managers in Belgium, the UK, Poland or Finland, and share the same core understanding of their leadership role – which can be useful even though and especially in cases where people’s behaviour differs in different cultural backgrounds. In addition to this, career paths have been opened up, as the qualification of managers is streamlined and contacts are established – and, on a personal as well as professional level, the seminars have created a ‘conversation space’ between European leaders that simply had not existed before. We started moving into the phase of a ‘learning organisation’ – building onto the previous steps, we are now offering workshops regarding specific topics for past participants of the leadership seminars, where we facilitate coaching between peers and the discussion of best practices.
The conclusions we have drawn from this project are the following: Going international with the HRD business does need several steps. You have to figure out the range of each step – appropriate to the culture of the company. In cooperation with courageous internal partners such as the Drive Academy, we were able to develop SEW’s awareness and ability to act as an international player.
We are proud to work with a company that has developed from a medium-sized family business to a successful and thriving global player. With our seminars, we believe we have been able to make a small contribution to this – and are looking forward to the next steps of furthering developing SEW managers’ skills in the future.
