Industry: Travel
Services provided: Leadership team development & coaching

Company

NUCO Travel are experts in providing unforgettable snow holidays and experiences for the ‘snowsports generation’. NUCO was set up in 2012 by a group of friends and now employs over 40 people (rising to many more during peak season) who provide the highest standard of snow shenanigans!

Challenge

NUCO are an energetic, fast-growing company with lots of young talent. As a result of their exceptional growth, many team members took on people management roles without any formal training. Consequently, many of those individuals didn’t see themselves as  leaders and couldn’t relate to being part of a ‘leadership team’.

There had been no previous people management development and there was often siloed working across departments. Performance management and development was also a ‘top-down’ process, with all the responsibility sitting with managers. Ultimately, NUCO needed to equip their people managers with the confidence and skills to undertake their new role and create a collaborative leadership team.

The final challenge they faced was that due to the nature of snow travel they have seasonally high peaks of work leading to a high turnover of seasonal staff.. As a result, people managers also needed to grasp how to work productively with new employees in a short timeframe across different geographical locations

Solution

CAPE collaborated with NUCO to create a bespoke programme that fit around the seasonal nature of their business to ensure the leadership team had the space to really think about how they operated before the ski season  commenced. Having the time and facilitated safe space to explore their leadership team purpose was vital to help the leadership team reflect on how they could collaborate to achieve those ambitions. There was a focus on enabling open conversations within the leadership team and learning how to work with each other effectively through greater awareness of individual preferences and challenges.

Through a combination of workshops and 1:1 coaching, CAPE helped NUCO’s managers develop the skills and confidence to navigate the personal and group responsibilities of being individual team members, people managers and members of the leadership team. CAPE also supported the team by facilitating a review of their approach to appraisals and managing performance to shift ownership and empowerment to the employees

Results

Since attending our programme, NUCO’s leaders have successfully come together as a team with a clear and agreed purpose. There’s more open and positive communication and increased confidence in having the conversations that matter…even the difficult ones. Leaders use a coaching style with their teams and colleagues, with employees taking more ownership and accountability for their performance and development. This has led to greater employee satisfaction and increased team morale at all levels.

With the new skills they have learnt as part of the development, NUCO has created their first people strategy with a revised approach to managing performance and retaining talent.  The aim is that this new approach will help them retain their high-energy, high-impact resort teams longer than one season. And, most impressively, they’ve just had their most successful season yet!