The Challenge: To enhance leadership skills in response to an internal employee survey highlighting shortcomings in this area.

The Solution: Find a leadership development process that would

• Address key concerns raised by the employee survey
• Work within a cross-cultural setting
• Produce “Situational Leaders” in keeping with personnel policy

The Results: Develop a customised version of The Ken Blanchard Companies^® Situational Leadership^® II Model that could be used by every manager in every country.

Whether V&S Group’s personnel policy statement requiring company leaders to be ‘situational leaders’ ever had anything to do with The Ken Blanchard Companies^® Situational Leadership^® II Model is open to debate! Yet when she heard Ken Blanchard speak in Copenhagen, Gunilla Winlund made an instant connection between the two.

“I understood how many SLII^® principles tied up with those raised by our employee survey,” she recalls, “and asked The Ken Blanchard Companies in Sweden to develop a training proposal for consideration by the group management team. The proposal was to include a crosscultural element and support our existing vision, mission, and goal focus.”

A 3+2+2 days’ training initiative over a six-to-eight month period was developed and checked out by the group management team. “We were the guinea pigs!” explains Gunilla. “We thought it was excellent and have gone on to train 280 managers in several countries so far. We’re continuing the process throughout the company, educating new managers as they join the organisation.”

“The cross-cultural element was a very interesting part and gave us some useful thoughts about how we act and react,” she adds. “Training has been delivered almost exclusively in the language of the country concerned, with only one group using English—a group including managers from the UK, Germany, and Estonia. It may be easier to use in some countries than others, but I do believe SLII would work anywhere in the world.”

Results

“V&S managers are thrilled with SLII,” insists Gunilla. “They embrace the concept of SLII wholeheartedly and the whole group is now beginning to speak the language. By combining SLII with a coaching for impact plan and a 360-degree tool, we hope to see tangible results. We’ve found SLII to be a great tool for diagnosing the leadership needs of each person on any task and also use it to assess what went wrong in any circumstance, to improve future competency. I am sure this will take us on the way to meeting our goals and securing our place as a worldclass, profitable, alcoholic beverage company.”

Gunilla Winlund is Senior Vice President, Human Resources, for the V&S Group, a leading producer and distributor of spirits and wines in Northern Europe and one of the world’s ten largest international spirits companies. The company owns famous brands such as Absolut Vodka, Plymouth Gin, Aalborgs Aquavit, and the old Danish bitter, Gammeldansk. Currently employing 2,200 people in ten countries in Europe and in the USA and Chile, and with international sales amounting to some 9.3 billion SEK, the company is one of the fastest growing in the sector. Gunilla Winlund is based at company HQ in Stockholm in Sweden and has special responsibility for succession planning and competence and management development. Appointed in November 2000, she worked previously as an independent HR consultant for about five years and prior to that she held positions as vice president HR within the international finance and insurance sectors.