Leadership development at Eurovia

Eurovia POLSKA S.A. is a leading contractor in the field of public works, focusing in the area of construction and maintenance of road infrastructure and urban development. It employs more than 1,000 workers in 35 different locations across Poland. As a local partner, Eurovia S.A. focuses primarily on mobility solutions that increase the economic competitiveness of regions and contribute to strengthening social ties. The Eurovia Group also has its own Research and Development Center in France, which develops innovative technologies that reduce the consumption of natural resources, increase safety and improve the durability of executed projects.

In January 2018, a representative from the HR Department suggested a meeting to “see if we could find some common ground.” During the meeting, it became clear that Eurovia was looking for a partner to help them strengthen the managerial competencies of their directors and managers from all over Poland.

They were particularly keen that the prepared program should be flexible and consistent, that participants should be able to choose the thematic scope of training that is particularly relevant to them at a given time, and that the training selected in subsequent years should form a coherent whole – the idea was to establish long-term cooperation.

Based on these assumptions, we have prepared a modular program of Manager’s Foundation, which consists of four independent blocks that form a coherent whole. The prepared process is based on our formula for strengthening leaders within the framework of the Leading a Winning Team program.As in previous years and editions, we dedicated one leading mentor to this program in order to maintain continuity of interaction with the supported managers and leaders.
Since then, we have had the pleasure of working with more than 250 Eurovia S.A managers during 28 meetings as part of the Manager’s Foundation project.At the same time, we began to strengthen selected leaders in the skills of effective conflict resolution using the mediation method. During a dedicated workshop, using the formula of experiential learning with high fidelity simulation. We imparted knowledge and, more importantly, also practical tools to enable the manager to reach agreement both within the organization and with external partners.
As part of this process of Conflict Resolution – reaching agreement within the organization and mediation in business, we strengthened more than 50 managers during 6 meetings.

Since Eurovia and us are convinced that leaders are effective if they base their daily work on the same paradigms, in the next phase we prepared a program fully dedicated to branch managers and board members. It was based on the advanced stages of the Leading a Winning Team formula. As a result, managers across the organization use a common set of competencies, a uniform perception of their roles, expectations and the support they can offer each other.
For this group of leaders, we have also prepared a program tailored to the specific challenges they face, to strengthen leadership communication.
As part of this process, based on the Communication is Your Job and Leader Best Practices Review programs, we strengthened more than 10 leaders over the course of 4 meetings.

In the course of our comprehensive program, we used both a training format, if the goal was to provide knowledge, and a workshop format, when we worked on competencies and skills. We relied on reliably proven psychological knowledge and an experiential learning approach using high-fidelity simulations. To perpetuate the process initiated at the face-to-face meetings, branch leaders were provided with our edition of The Light Book, so they could receive support from leaders around the world throughout the year – in the form of columns.

Our cooperation with Eurovia was also an opportunity for us to self-reflect and step out of the patterns of operation we had adopted so far. Our client’s industry, although new to us, turned out to be subject to the same laws of operation as other large organizational systems, so we could easily flexibly adapt our training program to the partner’s specific needs. Training spread out over the course of a year provided an opportunity to test the consistency of our training programs and their performance over time. We enjoyed observing how the participants put the knowledge and skills they gained at earlier stages into practice and how they built on them during subsequent, more advanced levels of training. By working with managers from every level of the organization: from line managers to those at the middle level to board members, we have seen that we can effectively support the development of each of them through our programs.