Virgin Atlantic’s leadership manager: Make coaching the centerpiece of leadership development strategy

Outside of healthcare and education, there are few businesses that were as pandemic-impacted as those within the travel and leisure industries. Virgin Atlantic was no exception to that.

In fact, as Kerry Isherwood, senior manager of leadership at Virgin Atlantic explained, at one point 90% of their workforce was furloughed, they had to restructure the business twice losing 45% of their staff, and were often reduced to relying on a skeleton team.

Yet, these hurdles didn’t dilute their purpose, Isherwood told a packed Learning & Skills stage on day two of Unleash World. Even during difficult times, they wanted to become the most-loved airline in the world, abide by core values, and keep high performance as a guiding virtue.

To get there, the well-recognized airline saw managers and leaders as central to this, understanding that individuals in these positions have an outsized effect on engagement, productivity, and performance.

Yet, with a trimmed-down workforce — the result of restructures and a decision to not engage with external hiring during the pandemic — they needed to get recently promoted managers up-to-speed with the Virgin Atlantic way of doing things. Something that will resonate with many businesses.

As Isherwood laid out, Virgin Atlantic wanted both experienced and recently-promoted leaders to be able to lead with trust, put their people’s wellbeing front and center, be curious, and want to develop themselves and their reports and be able to communicate purposefully and connect positively with staff.

To get there, Isherwood explained it would require a transformation of leadership development and a reconceived approach to how L&D interpolates with work.

Individuals with leadership responsibilities would need to be given agency over their time to be able to work on developing leadership skills. On the flip side, Isherwood explained that the business would need to understand how learning boosts facets of work that are crucial to positive outcomes, such as happiness and engagement.

And with an increasingly digitally-first and dispersed workforce, and operating in an environment whereby spend effectiveness is increasingly center stage, Isherwood explained that coaching, delivered via digital means, has become the centerpiece of this leadership development strategy.

As she said: “Learning needs to reflect the digital reality – but that doesn’t mean all learning needs to be digital.”

Whilst Virgin Atlantic does retain some in-person learning, Isherwood noted that improving access to digital coaching means employees get access to guidance (coaching) that was once just available to a privileged few — meaning leadership skills development can be distributed more widely and equitably through the organization — with the added benefit of it being available in the flow of work and at a cost-effective price point.

In addition, an approach to leadership development that utilizes coaching means that incumbent leaders also get the opportunity to share their skills with others in the organization.

And although Isherwood warns that coaching isn’t for everyone — part of the reason why Virgin Atlantic retains a multi-pronged development strategy — she emphasized that coaching at its most effective can have an outsized impact on leadership development success:

It’s the most effective tool to develop leaders of today and in future.

In fact, in Isherwood’s view coaching can change employees’ lives inside and outside of work as long as it is entered into voluntarily.

It means the pressure is on for HR to make coaching accessible, engaging, and effective meaning the function has to think about how it is delivered (LXP, partnership, or internal) what good coaching looks like (what skills those coaches have), and what the purpose of coaching is (to drive better individual performance which results in gains for the customer).

As ever, no small task.