Academic insights into best practice, peer learning and an opportunity to network with other businesses are just some of the benefits Brown Thomas Arnotts gets from its participation in Trinity Business School’s executive programmes.
Brown Thomas Arnotts (BTA) is part of Selfridges Group, a major international retailer which employs 3,500 people. Louise Harvey is senior HR Learning, Development and Engagement leader with Brown Thomas, and a fan of Trinity Business School.
“The customer experience is at the heart of everything we do. We pride ourselves on leading in this space,” she explains.
“As part of driving excellence in customer experience, the Customer Management Leadership group programme within Trinity Business School offered us the opportunity to gain insights from others that are dedicated to leadership and excellence in this space.”
In particular, it allowed the iconic retail company to “address particular business themes and challenges that are relevant for our business for maximum learning and business impact,” says Harvey.
“It’s a forum that fosters openness, allowing us to share our experiences and gain insight from other businesses, what they were doing, lessons learned, what worked well and what didn’t.”
Having noncompeting companies in the group was a key factor for us
It also allows participants to gain an understanding of current thinking and best practice, with industry-specific examples. That helps “build capability within our own senior management on specific business themes and challenges, highlighting how we might leverage and apply these insights,” she says.
“Having noncompeting companies in the group was a key factor for us in terms of guaranteeing an ‘openness’ for the programme, ensuring this would be a successful exercise for our participants.”
Tailored
The programme was tailored to Brown Thomas’s needs. “Having the ability to cocreate and influence the content of the programme and ensuring the narrative was relevant for us was a unique benefit of the Customer Management Leadership group programme,” says Harvey.
“It may sound impossible to get eight companies in a room, deciding and agreeing on key themes and masterclasses for the programme but remarkably a consensus formed with relative ease.”
The benefits were manifold. “From the employee engagement masterclass we gained insight into ways to enhance the embedding of our values in everything we do. The setting allowed us to learn not only from the Trinity academics leading the course but also the other companies.”
We would highly recommend this programme to others working in this field
Peer learning
Peer learning is invaluable. “For example, as a result of networking with other companies, we gained insights into their experience with a vendor we were considering for an internal social platform. This company has offered to share their experience of this vendor and how they found the platform in question – what worked for them and what didn’t. These simple takeaways have been shared with the team working on this project within Brown Thomas Arnotts to help inform their decisions on a vendor solution.”
Feedback from all BTA staff who attended a range of different masterclasses with Trinity Business School has been very positive. “We would highly recommend this programme to others working in this field,” she says.
“A unique aspect of the programme is the flexibility around the number of delegates that attend. The nominated participants for each masterclass topic are ideally those that have the most insight to gain from the topic area. However delegates can weave in and out of these masterclass programmes, with different delegates partaking in the different masterclass topics. In addition, some of the real value can be found through networking opportunities on the day, for both our business and our people.”
Trinity has set about making a world class business school and now ranks in the top two per cent of business schools worldwide. Now amongst the fast growing business schools in Europe, its new facility opens on Thursday, May 23rd.
