John Lewis

John Lewis Partnership – ‘Face the Music’…. and hit all the right notes

Peter Jones, the Chelsea department store that is part of the John Lewis Partnership has, like any other organisation, a number of ongoing projects. The store wanting to prepare its sixty-four person management team for the future challenging projects and stretching targets that they will face decided to send them all on the ‘Face the Music’ leadership event run Matchett. An innovative Leadership course, which is also a Team-Building event par excellence—with the added bonus of raising thousands for charity!

Face the Music is designed to engage the learners in a powerful collective experience which will produce high volumes of behavioural information about team and the individuals in it in a short space of time. It also provides long term learning because of the emotions involved: groups find that they are connecting with what they learnt months or years after the event.

What they had to do was write, rehearse and record five tracks for a music CD which they then had to sell to raise at least £2,500.00 for a specific charity. Although musicians were provided by Matchett, they weren’t allowed to get involved until a full session schedule had been created. The attendees had to write the songs, plan the marketing and promotion and take care of the fund-raising.

How effective was it? Well, the team more than tripled their fund-raising target and in the process learnt lots about themselves. Peter Jones Project Manager Julian White said: ‘The main thing we were trying to do was to build a unified management team. Everyone is euphoric.
They’ve all come together. They’ve bonded. We’ve learned that nothing is impossible!’

Peter Jones’s Deputy Managing Director Paul Hunt said ‘The whole object was to bring everyone to the boil at the same time for the completion of the renovation work. We’ve achieved that.’