Tate & Lyle: Leadership skills workshop

How can we help our leaders become more creative problem solvers? 

Global food and drink supplier Tate & Lyle came to us during a period of transformation.

Following the spin out of its sugar and manufacturing businesses, Tate & Lyle’s leaders were coming together across three days in London to build alignment about the business’ purpose to transform lives through food, and how they will do this in the long term.

A key component of this event was to reinforce and develop a set of behaviours critical to their future, including Curiosity, Challenge, Flow and Courage. To help Tate & Lyle’s leaders do this, we ran an ExperienceInnovation™ | Aware workshop – an experiential, practical session, to introduce them to the cues and habits creative professionals employ to bring creativity into their daily work.

Through this workshop, we explored how the group can use creative habits like deep user empathy, radical collaboration and rapid experimentation to provoke fresh ideas and solve problems. The executives created and shared 40 new ideas and related challenge statements in this two hour session.

“In this workshop we encouraged leaders to pay attention to the cues around them such as, ‘When you have an idea, before pursuing it, ask yourself: what is the question underneath this idea?’ There may be a more impactful solution when you share the question with others. Not only did the leaders at Tate & Lyle get a chance to stretch their ‘creative legs’ and share some ideas with their peers, they also produced an inventory of challenges from the most influential people in the organisation to be drawn upon in the quarters to come.”

Nathan Waterhouse, Managing Director, Treehouse Innovation