PepsiCo has a strong people culture that places its employees at the heart of its business. They realise the important role that teams play in driving growth, delivering results, and having a positive impact on their organisation. To achieve this, they wanted to establish a focus on high performing, highly effective teams through the implementation of their new SUPER5 model for team effectiveness. This team-first approach would enable their people to tackle complex problems and deliver amazing results whilst also fostering a community of highly engaged, and motivated employees who would remain with the business and go the extra mile for their customers. 

As part of the implementation of their team effectiveness model, PepsiCo were looking for an organisation-wide solution to upskill their employees with the unique set of skills and capabilities to support teams, whilst also embedding the SUPER5 model and toolkit.  PepsiCo wanted a scalable solution that could be delivered to all corners of their global markets whilst at the same time offering support to the application of SUPER5 locally. As such, they were looking to take a phased approach:

Phase 1:Upskill the Talent and HR Business Partner community as team effectiveness coaches.

Phase 2:Support team managers to lead their own team to effectiveness using SUPER5.

Phase 3:Training individual contributors on SUPER5 and how they can contribute to the effectiveness of the teams they are a part of.

Phase 1 involved designing and delivering a programme, “Coaching a SUPER Team”, which would upskill PepsiCo’s Talent and HR community with essential team coaching skills, whilst using the SUPER5 model and toolkit as the key method for delivering highly effective team coaching sessions.

The design process was very much a partnership approach. We worked closely with the global leadership development team to ensure the programme outcomes and content were completely aligned with their key strategic objectives. Using our industry-leading expertise in teams and coaching teams for high performance, we designed a solution that would equip participants with the necessary skills and competencies to effectively coach PepsiCo teams using SUPER5. This included:

• The design and development of 10 core competencies of a PepsiCo Team Effectiveness Coach. These provided participants with a framework which they could self-assess their skills against to better understand their strengths and areas for development as they developed their team coaching practice.
• The programme itself was designed to be delivered across 2 x 3-hour live online workshops, with approximately 1-hour of pre-work before each module. After the second module, participants were then invited to attend a 90-minute action learning group where they could receive group coaching on any challenges they had experienced whilst facilitating team effectiveness sessions.
• A case study of a “typical” PepsiCo team was created for the programme to give participants an opportunity to practice their team effectiveness coaching competencies and become more confident with the SUPER5 model and toolkit.
• We determined that it was essential to maximise the time in the live online workshops for facilitated discussion, so we scripted and filmed 8 videos which would support the programme as pre-work. We also scripted 14 videos which would accompany the SUPER5 toolkit and provide participants with further guidance on how to use the tools successfully with their teams.

In the spirit of partnership and continuous improvement, we remained agile and flexible to ongoing feedback from both the participants themselves and key stakeholders of the programme. For instance, we adjusted the design of the programme by reducing the length of pre-work before each module in response to feedback collected after delivering the programme to the first round of cohorts.

Over the course of 4 months, we delivered the programme to 10 cohorts with 250+ participants joining from all over the world. Participants demonstrated high engagement and satisfaction with the programme, rating the programme 4.5/5 on average. The action learning groups were also rated highly, achieving an average score of 4.7/5.

Furthermore, after attending the programme, 56% participants rated themselves as either “Confident” or “Extremely Confident” about Team Effectiveness Coaching using SUPER5. This represented a 21% increase since the start of the programme. 96% participants reported having at least “Some Confidence” after attending the programme, with no participants rating themselves as “Not at all Confident”.

This scalable solution will continue to support PepsiCo as it implements SUPER5 across the organisation. The “Coaching a SUPER Team” programme now forms an essential part of PepsiCo’s learning and development portfolio, enabling their people to effectively support teams with a team-first approach.