What we do

At March Friday we work with our clients to bring about organisational and individual change. Our work is typically a combination of:

  • Advice on organisational change and leadership development
  • One-to-one coaching
  • Team coaching – working with leadership teams on how they collectively shape the direction of a business and develop themselves at the same time (opposite sides of the same coin)
  • Specialist personal development programmes in the area of leadership and change

The heart of our approach is to be delivering both business and personal change simultaneously; creating business benefit at the same time as building personal capability. Every client is unique and we adapt our activities for each assignment.

These recent clients are examples of this approach in practice:

Barclays Capital

Talent and performance management...

The investment banking arm of Barclays was growing rapidly in all the major financial centres globally and were worked with a senior team of leaders drawn together to shape the people development agenda. We facilitated the discussion, decision making and the project implementation of their priority areas of talent – how to grow capability - and performance management – getting productivity from an expanding workforce. A new area for many of these highly successful bankers, we focussed on the education and development of the senior committee as a means to drive a change in approach to people throughout the organisation.

Rolls-Royce

Change through large scale events...

The Rolls-Royce Civil Aerospace business is a global leader in the design and manufacture of aircraft engines with a long and celebrated history. We worked with their Commercial Business on a project called ‘Stepping Up’, which sought to push decision making down the organisation in response to the twin pressures of increasing revenues and reducing costs. This involved working with the leadership team on their behaviour as well as engaging the whole function in taking responsibility for performance improvement. We ran a series of ‘Open Space’ events with up to 200 people, generating discussion and action on ideas to respond to their business challenges, while providing the leadership team the opportunity to model new empowering behaviours.

National Express Group

Improving decision making at the top...

This substantial UK coach, bus and train business operated a business unit structure without a Group Human Resources Director. Without this senior specialist in the business, we worked with the Chief Executive and his Senior Directors, along with the Chairman and Non-Executive Directors on matters of remuneration. We were not acting as technical remuneration advisors, who were already appointed, but played a facilitating role between all parties - improving the dialogue and decision making - with our work focused on the activities of the Remuneration Committee.

GlaxoSmithKline

Development for senior technical staff...

We ran a series of specialist ‘master classes’ with this pharmaceutical giant. Based on the work of March Friday founder, Graham Abbey, published in the business book ‘Clued Up: Managing through Politics and Complexity’ (co-authored with Alan Robertson), the development workshops were run for senior technical staff, needing to understand how to operate in a more successfully in a political and complex environment.

We have also based open invitation sessions on Graham's books and, for example, run them as part of a global conference for consultants at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Graham's second book is called Managing Talented People and was also written with Alan Robertson.