The challenge
Founded by supersmart duo Steven Melford and Simon Garnett, The Forge is an insight-driven innovation consultancy, highly regarded by top marketing businesses like Diageo, Innocent and PepsiCo for their ability to translate what people will care about in the future into commercial returns.
Although their reputation and business performance was strong, The Forge team had identified a need to shift from transactional relationships to meaningful, personal connections that would set the business up for long-term success.
Their challenge was that they hadn’t been intentional about giving their client relationships the time & effort needed to unlock that next-level quality that would their business performance. They had a few long-term partnerships, these took years to develop and were the exception, not the norm.
That’s where LockSmith came in.
Creating a leadership culture
To help The Forge make the shift from account-based, transactional business relationships and reactive, project-based behaviour to deep, quality, personal relationships that would unlock new growth & value, we designed and delivered a four-month journey of collective learning and doing that was laser focused on empathy and understanding.
Drawing from our Unlock Amazing Relationships course and using the DISC behavioural profiling tool, we delivered four flagship workshops: Understand Clients, Understand Yourself, Unlock Better Relationships, and Action Planning. We know from experience that a transformative change in self-awareness and relational intelligence needs more than workshops. We took a 360 approach that stretched beyond the workshop room, including group coaching, a facilitated Slack channel for live client issues and a series of accountability clinics.
The solution
Drawing on our 25 years’ client experience, we ran an empathy-focused workshop designed to help the team understand their clients’ personas and commercial pressures. We blended inspiration and candid real-life anecdotes with practical exercises, such as a client P&L session and live client panel.
Using the DISC behavioural tool we facilitated a deep exploration of each person’s communication preferences and how they affect team dynamics. We used a variety of immersive techniques to maximise learning:
- Rotational exercises at flip charts to keep everyone moving.
- A combination of group discussion and buddy work to ensure everyone was exposed to a diverse range of voices & perspectives.
- We got the team working with our ‘Great Relationships’ framework, a strategic tool to help the team arrive at a relationship blueprint and specific signature for The Forge.
Whole business buy in
Getting senior sponsorship for training is always key to our approach. Fortunately, every single senior leader and consultant at The Forge was fully engaged and hands-on from the start.
From the quality of questions and provocation in the workshops to the enthusiastic peer-peer support offered in our dedicated Slack group, the team took self-directed learning seriously and all the time, commitment, and behind-the-scenes efforts they put in ensured the training was maximised to its fullest potential.
The Impact
With our training, The Forge team has developed tailored relationship playbooks for each consultant, complete with personalised relationship plans for their key clients. We’re proud to say that The Forge team are already using tools from the training to improve the quality of their client relationships.
We’re here to help
For more information or to book a training course, contact us at chris@locksmith.works or alex@locksmith.works. Let’s unlock your team’s potential!
