Norah Franchetti, Crown Worldwide Group Vice President of Marketing, Learning & Development, was recently featured in The Sunday Times, one of the top-selling Sunday newspaper in the United Kingdom. In the article titled "Plug the Leadership Gap," Franchetti and other carefully selected leadership experts discuss the importance of British companies' development of future leaders within their organizations.
Franchetti describes leadership development as "much a part of learning as picking up new computer skills and other technical abilities." She notes, of Crown's past needs, “We are in almost 60 countries now, so we need to develop our people to lead them . . . [but] we didn’t have a senior leadership program until 2009.” “We had a variety of ad hoc leadership programs, like many companies. Most of it was on the job, and we sent some people on courses.”
Her firm belief in the importance of developing leaders and equipping them with the right skill sets led to the creation of Crown's successful leadership program, the Crown Leadership Journey. The program takes a selected group of Crown employees through a six-month learning period. Its focus is on building six leadership skills that are identified as critical to business success as well as professional growth. The article highlights how Franchetti's restructuring of Crown's leadership development strategy in 2009 has enabled the program to produce many effective leaders who help propel the business within the company today. Projects assigned as part of the six-month program have been instrumental in bringing new ideas and improvements to the business.
“The outcome has been unbelievable in terms of the projects we have implemented in the business, [and] people have really grown as part of it,” she said. “Almost half of the people who have been on the program have taken on a bigger leadership role in the company, which was our goal.”
The article can be read in its entirety here.