The Cresset (Peterborough)

Unlocking internal potential to deliver powerfully effective training

Opened by HRH the Queen in 1978, The Cresset is a multi-purpose community, conference and theatre venue serving the people of Peterborough and environs. A registered charity, it has a commercial trading company that covenants its profits back annually to help maintain the facilities, and also acts as a resource centre for a number of partner organisations.

The Cresset’s management invoked Wingivers’ help to provide some help with training, with a view to ensuring that the skills of all its people were used as effectively as possibly in the drive to enhance operating performance. There were three specific objectives to attain: happy customers, extra sales, and delivering a cost-effective service. Given practical and time constraints, it was decided to concentrate on the first two of these, though a number of ideas were generated for the third objective as well.

Characteristically, Wingivers opted to work with the client’s own internal staff by encouraging and supporting them to develop their own, business-specific training solutions, rather than ‘sending in a sage’ to dispense a conventional external training programme. By showing existing staff how they could achieve this, the resulting levels of motivation and engagement were considerably greater than they would otherwise have been.

Wingivers’ work was divided into four sessions. The first of these was a brief planning session to introduce people, set the scene and map out objectives and processes. The second was very much a working session, with Wingivers’ personnel facilitating the development of short training modules by a number of Cresset staff representing all areas of the organisation. The third session involved the refinement, presentation and further modification of these modules, and it was after this that Cresset staff ran the live sessions. The fourth and final session involved detailed feedback, review and discussion on how to move forward.

As usual, Wingivers’ approach was not to impose and dictate, but to bring light-touch support and facilitation for the client’s own people to develop something that really worked for them. While Wingivers’ extensive expertise in processes and structures helped to provide both the direction and a framework for effective training, it was The Cresset’s own employees who developed the specific content, based on their own experience of the relevant areas (e.g. good/bad customer service) and applying this to future customer interactions.

In the view of the Wingivers’ consultants facilitating the process, the commitment and creativity demonstrated by the Cresset staff involved was little short of breathtaking. One team even created their own board-game, which was highly impressive as a training aid in its relevance to the business need – and this was just one of many highly creative responses.

In short, the client’s staff showed a real sense of caring about their organisation – and about each other – thus demonstrating a very high level of team spirit. (It was gratifying to see this occurring so naturally, as it often has to be coaxed out of people!) Even through the busy pre-Christmas period when these training interventions were taking place, people were clearly putting in far more than the minimum requirement in terms of hours and contribution.

Other benefits that Wingivers brought to the party included the provision of totally objective feedback (something that staff weren’t necessarily used to receiving) about the kind of initiatives that were likely to work more or less well in practice, and holding people to account by requiring them to commit to specific actions within a specific timeframe (again, something that they hadn’t necessarily been used to in the past).

The management team were both surprised and impressed by the quality of training developed following Wingivers’ facilitation, and the brilliant efforts of their own staff. It just goes to show that, when you give individuals the right levels of support, challenge and – in particular – freedom to achieve, they will almost certainly exceed your expectations and come up with outstanding solutions to business problems. And when this kind of success results from unlocking potential within your own organisation rather than simply importing external expertise, it’s even more gratifying.