Developing skills amongst future leaders and connecting them to their organisation’s purpose

The Emerging Talent cohort at Nationwide is made up of graduates, apprentices and colleagues on industrial placements. To support their development, we gave them challenging projects with two of Nationwide’s key charity partners – and, in doing so, connected them to the Building Society’s purpose around housing.

In working with Shelter and St Mungo’s to devise projects that would run over a three month period, we kept in mind key learning objectives for the cohort such as building relationships and effective collaboration. Projects were varied, from devising a new gaming product to help Shelter attract new supporters, to creating a virtual fundraising event for St Mungo’s.

We provided healthy doses of support and challenge through regular team coaching, helping the participants develop skills in communications, teamworking, influencing without authority, stakeholder engagement, dealing with ambiguity and resilience.

Learning about housing and homelessness issues and the ways in which they connect to Nationwide’s core values made the projects all the more meaningful to those taking part.

The value was seen by Shelter and St Mungo’s too, who benefited from strategies, ideas and prototypes for new fundraising and awareness-raising products, campaigns and events.

“Three Hands did a fantastic job of coaching our Apprentices and Graduates during their Social Investment Project work, ensuring a collaborative approach was taken by the groups and the charities involved, namely Shelter & St Mungo’s. The skills learnt by the individual employees have supported their development goals and career at Nationwide.”

Treena Noakes, Consultant, Talent & Behavioural Insights Practice

“The social investment project was a fantastic opportunity to learn skills and take on responsibilities outside of the day job. Three Hands were really helpful in providing a structure that gave our team enough guidance and support whilst also giving us the space to test and learn across a variety of projects”

Sam Martin, Propositions & Engagement Graduate