The Pearse Walsh Award for Innovation in the Transfer of Learning, is now in its 14^th year, was launched to honour our founder Pearse Walsh for his passion for innovation and creativity.

A huge congratulations to the 2020 Winners Musgraves on behalf of SuperValu for their Leading for Growth – a Store Owner Leadership Development Programme.

The key principle at the heart of the Leading for Growth (LfG) programme is that authentic leadership delivers sustainable business advantage. Given their retailers’ varied backgrounds they developed a blended Authentic Leadership Development programme for their SuperValu Store Owners. Over 10 months owners from hugely varied backgrounds developed their personal, business and authentic leadership through:

• A series of Leadership Peer Workshops – high-end facilitation coupled with thought-provoking external speakers prompting additional insight/disruption to thinking. External speakers came from a wide variety of backgrounds e.g. business – Breege O’Donoghue (Primark) and sports – Davy Russell (jockey).
• Executive Coaching – providing individual support and challenge
• Bespoke tools to provide insight (psychometric & employee engagement survey)

The judging panel were Eamonn Eaton from Harvest and Una Healy Head of Learning and Development from the PM Group, last year’s worthy winners, said:

“The team demonstrated great insight into how both programme participants and also the delivery team can mutually gain from a development programme. They have a teacher/teacher outlook where the coaches grow and develop as they work with the coaches. The programme is delivered to independent store managers who have to pay to come on the programme. This is a breakthrough initiative for these store managers completely outside their comfort zone. Evidence of a strong transfer of learning and business impact was presented and a real sense that success is in the impact on sales, staff retention, customer experience and the difference a store manager can make ti all dimensions of the business. The unique aspect of this initiative is the delivery teams observations on the business outcomes achieved during the Covid-19 crisis. They could demonstrate the difference in the speed that stores adapted to the new normal between managers who have been trained and those who have not – they have a unique control group situation. This sets this initiative apart in terms of business impact achieved and this is evidenced as they now have 36 managers applying for 20 places on their next programme”

Congratulations also to our highly commended shortlisted finalists:

Lidl for their NEW2, New You programme

The judging panel said: “The team demonstrated that their initiative had scale, excellent logistics and organisation, creativity and innovation in design and really made a positive difference in the transition to the new warehouse distribution centre location. Learning from their experience is informing the approach for subsequent projects and this is great to see. The programme certainly won the hearts and minds of the participants and is a credit to the full team involved.”

Irish Distillers / Pernod Ricard Irish Distiller yourFUTURE – our graduate off-boarding programme

The judging panel said: “The presentation was extremely professional and very well structured and thought through. This programme demonstrated a very robust methodology, excellent integration with the business and pioneering use of a technology networking platform. Good evidence of ROI in terms of recovery of programme costs through reduction in recruitment costs. Strong sense of sustainability in terms of programme longevity, programme evolution and continuous improvement. The branding, alumni concept and involvement of past participants as mentors is a particular strength. The passion and commitment of the team were evident throughout and this initiative could have won in a different group of shortlisted candidates.”