EY worked with the Metropolitan Police Service (the Met) to design and deliver a unique leadership development programme for 10,000 officers.
Not only is crime increasing in London, it’s also getting more complex. The Met’s challenge is to address this while balancing constrained resources, budgets and capability, as well as facing rising public scrutiny.
The new Met Commissioner saw investing in a more accountable, empowered and engaged cadre of leaders – and bringing about a shift in culture – as imperatives. So, in 2018, a ground-breaking leadership development and culture change programme designed to equip leaders with the behaviours and skills needed to ‘to keep London safe for everyone’ was announced – Leading for London (LfL). Its objectives were to improve operational performance, make the Met more inclusive, build public confidence and improve staff morale and engagement.
The pressure to succeed was huge. Not least because of the £10m of public investment but also because of the short timescales involved. Previous attempts at change programmes had limited success. The Met needed tailored learning content for 10,000 busy operational police officers and staff covering personal leadership, team leadership and future leadership delivered over an 18-month period.
We worked with the Met to create a practical, integrated learning experience where coaching, workshops and digital interactions all reinforced each other to embed learning and fitted around 24hr/365 operational duties. To do this we blended digital/classroom learning, technology-powered simulations, one-to-one coaching, personality profiling and more. Drawing on the best of EY and its ecosystem of suppliers, our team supported the Met’s ambition by bringing together a multi-disciplinary and collaborative team to deliver the programme.
As a result, Met leaders received authentic experiential learning from peer facilitators, while EY provided the supporting technology, infrastructure and governance to deliver maximum impact, both during the programme and for a lasting legacy.
The programme was set to run for 18 months but, based on participant feedback, it now forms a key part of the Met’s promotion curriculum for new managers and leaders. As a result, the first new promotions to take this version of LfL awarded net promoter scores of 95% for coaching and over 80% for the workshops.
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