Recently Symmetra had the pleasure of partnering with the Seoul Sales and Marketing team in a manufacturing and distribution company of consumer goods. The international company has made some early progress with their broad diversity and inclusion agenda. They wanted to use the brand strategy workshop in Seoul as a strong, compelling and visible symbol for embedding diversity and inclusion in their business. Let us tell you how this was achieved.
The Seoul Sales and Marketing team scheduled a 3 day brand strategy workshop with a diverse group of participants from Sales, Marketing, HR, and Finance as well as General Managers. The first day focused on Symmetra building participants’ capability and confidence to create the right environment and leverage diversity of thought for creating an innovative brand strategy. More specifically one of our Executive Facilitators, Rod Smart, facilitated a highly interactive and compelling workshop to:
- Build the business case for diversity and inclusion to achieve innovation and high performance
- Introduced the concept of and cultural conditions required to leverage diversity of thought
- Highlighted common unconscious biases that hinder innovation
- Shared and practiced strategies for counteracting bias as well as creating psychological safety and inclusion.
The rest of the workshop focused on building the brand strategy whilst applying some of the newly learned techniques. Rod played a ‘real time coaching’ role during these 2 days. He provided both informal and structured feedback to individuals and the group as a whole to help them maintain psychological safety, foster inclusion and leverage the diversity of thought in the room.
Feedback from participants highlight the value Rod and Symmetra made to the workshop experience as well as the quality of the brand strategy produced:
Rod says “An exciting and most productive new application of Symmetra’s ground breaking ideas to the process of strategy building”.
Symmetra’s experience shows that blending the capability building with application and coaching can help build real, solid engagement and commitment for diversity and inclusion.
