Coalesce Management Consulting held our Management Conference 2022 in Milan at the end of last month - a chance for many of our global leaders from our UK, Netherlands and Singapore offices to meet up, collaborate and discuss new ideas for how we can continue to deliver true expertise.
Along with managers and senior leaders from across our Group, Coalesce colleagues were invited to spend time understanding where we are as a business, what our growth plans are for the future and how we can continue to improve our internal culture and our best service commitments - all under the theme of “Leading with Positivity”.
That direction was key to the structure of the conference, ensuring that through workshops and discussions over two days were we able to focus on practical, positive ideas for improvement to our business. As a global entity, it’s important to us to gain inputs from all our regions, helping us to understand the challenges and opportunities for each area and ensuring we’re listening to a diverse range of ideas.
I’m pleased to say that we all came out of the sessions with new ideas - some of which we can begin implementing immediately and others that we will be following up on over the coming weeks.
This also demonstrated one of the biggest highlights of a conference like this - giving colleagues who operate in different regions the chance to come together and meet in person.
There are many benefits to being a global business, but one of the best is being able to work with such a diverse group of employees, coming from different backgrounds, living and working in different countries, but all striving towards the same goal.
However it’s not always easy to get to know your colleagues well when you’re in different parts of the world, communicating through email, zoom and phone calls. For that reason it really becomes special when we get to gather together in person and see how well our colleagues from all over the globe can build a stronger bond, enjoy each others company and learn more about each other.
This culminated in a brilliant display of collaboration and friendly competition during a series of tasks set by our amazing keynote speaker - former Olympian Michelle Griffith Robinson OLY.
Michelle kicked off our event with a truly inspiring speech, emphasising key takeaways that everyone can use to progress their lives; all with her incredible, infectious enthusiasm that got everyone energised for the rest of the conference. I can’t relay everything that Michelle talked about (and writing it down would not do justice to her fierce, energetic delivery) but some leading highlights included :
Set your own non-negotiable behaviours
Surround yourself with people who cheer you on
Find your tribe - whether that’s your family, friends, colleagues, social circles - who will hold you accountable and celebrate your achievements
Live by the 80/20 rule - you can’t be perfect all the time so allow yourself to fail sometimes, as long as you pick up again the next day and get back to it.
These are all inspirational ideas that each of our colleagues can apply to their lives both inside and outside work - and really set the tone for some of the ideas that came out of our later workshops.
The physical challenges introduced by Michelle also brought out the innate competitive nature that it seems we all share at Coalesce, that also helped to bring us all together and learn to collaborate well towards a shared goal.
This key learning will be brought back to our individual offices and help us continue to work better across multiple regions as a Group. Understanding each other better, knowing how we all work will all make us stronger as a team and help us work together towards our best service commitments.
We have some great ideas that will be helping us grow our services even further and continue to deliver for our customers, and we’re excited to begin sharing them with you very soon.