The Challenge

Arla operates in a fast-paced, consumer-driven environment, with constant pressure around quality, safety, innovation and performance. Against that backdrop, strong leadership and a consistent leadership culture are critical.

Arla’s leadership development team wanted to evolve its existing approach: reaching more leaders, faster, while creating a much stronger connection between leadership development and the organisation’s strategy, values and everyday business challenges.

The ambition was therefore bigger than delivering leadership training. Arla wanted to create a shared understanding of what GOOD leadership looks like, build stronger cross-functional networks and give leaders practical ways to bring its 12 Leadership Competencies to life with their own teams.

The Solution

At the heart of the refreshed Leadership Development portfolio is the Arla Leadership Programme Bootcamp — a highly immersive, two-day experience for around 100 leaders at a time.

Rather than teaching leadership through presentations and theory, the Bootcamp puts leaders into a series of carefully designed experiences, dilemmas and challenges that require them to practise, reflect on and apply Arla’s 12 Leadership Competencies in real time.

INVOLVE designed, produces and facilitates the Bootcamp, creating an environment where leaders are challenged individually and collectively while building relationships across functions, geographies and areas of the business.

Day 1: Experience and reflect

Day 1 brings all 12 Leadership Competencies to life through a series of immersive team challenges, followed by facilitated debriefing, self-reflection and personalisation.

To support this, INVOLVE designed a Personal Learning Record, enabling leaders to reflect on each experience, assess themselves against the competencies, identify development areas and capture practical actions they can take back into their role.

Day 2: Turn learning into action

Day 2 moves from personal learning to activation — challenging leaders to consider how they will bring the competencies to life with the people they lead.

At the heart of the day is the Leadership Expo. Working in teams, leaders brainstorm and create an engaging way of helping their own teams explore all of the 12 competencies. Their idea might be a game, activity, ritual or team experience — but it has to be both inspiring and useful back in the real world.

Teams then showcase their ideas to the rest of the cohort in an Expo-style marketplace. Leaders experience and vote on one another’s concepts, considering both how inspiring the idea is and how useful it is.

Extending the impact beyond the Bootcamp

The strongest ideas don’t stop at the Expo.

Following each Bootcamp, the best concepts are added to Arla’s Passport to Leadership — a growing collection of the 12 strongest ideas generated through Leadership Expos to date.

The Passport gives leaders across Arla a practical set of activities they can use with their own teams, meaning ideas created by one cohort can go on to engage and involve leaders and colleagues across the wider organisation.

Across the two days, experiences include:

The Results

Impact is measured consistently before and after every Bootcamp using three core questions linked to participants’ understanding, application and leadership network.

Across the programme, the average post-Bootcamp score is 8.5 out of 10, representing an average +24% shift across the three measures and exceeding the programme target.

Participant advocacy has also remained exceptionally strong. Leaders are asked how likely they would be to recommend the Bootcamp to colleagues, with the programme currently achieving an average NPS of 82, against a target of 50.

To date, 13 Bootcamps have been delivered, creating an expanding network of leaders with a shared understanding of GOOD Leadership — and a growing bank of practical ideas created by leaders, for leaders, through the Leadership Expo and Passport to Leadership.