Activating values in an international management team

After a period of expansion and a near doubling of the number of employees, Inter IKEA Centre Group A/S needed to strengthen the value-based leadership in the company.

Inter IKEA Centre Group A/S develops, owns, and operates shopping centres around the world. As a result of an expansion strategy, the company had almost doubled its workforce in two years and entered new geographical markets.

Top management realised that not all managers were living the company’s values in practice and contacted RelationsPeople to help strengthen value-based leadership in the company. A few years earlier, RelationsPeople had helped the company develop a new leadership foundation with vision, mission, and values.

RelationsPeople’s consultants first interviewed the leaders and found that they understood the company’s values differently and their leadership behaviour was therefore different. The differences were due to the fact that not all managers had been involved in the development of the values and the values were perceived differently from country to country due to cultural differences.

RelationsPeople then developed a leadership development programme consisting of a series of full-day workshops for top management and country directors, where they explored the values and linked them to their own leadership behaviour. In addition, RelationsPeople ran an executive coaching programme for the top managers at the Danish headquarters to strengthen their individual values-based leadership. After six months, the 20 leaders had a shared understanding of the values and their rationale and were able to develop and implement a set of behaviours that supported a shared values-based leadership approach while respecting cultural differences.