Engaging and developing leadership capability

Developing our managers and senior managers is key to our success and we continue to invest in developing our leaders. Our future business performance is dependent on good succession planning for senior management roles. We aim to develop our own people targeting as many senior appointments from within the organisation as possible. We have continued the investment in our leaders this year through a number of programmes including Costa Rica and TUI Horizons.

Costa Rica

This year, as part of our leadership development programme, 75 senior managers from across the Group had the opportunity to attend a four-day offsite development programme in Costa Rica. The programme was designed by Group Management Development working in collaboration with i-to-i, one of our Activity businesses. Each cohort completed building work and made business improvements in a small eco-tourism business in the rainforest. The eco-tourism business formed a live case study where delegates applied the Group’s Managing for Value framework to identify opportunities to improve business processes.

Participants practised their leadership skills in a challenging, culturally diverse and unfamiliar setting, working with peers and members of the local community who run the Heliconias Lodge in Costa Rica. A positive business outcome was that a number of cross-Group projects were initiated by participants who had identified opportunities to work together while in Costa Rica. The project was completed successfully in September 2009 and we are now investigating a number of destinations and new project ideas to offer a similar development programme for our senior managers in 2010.

TUI Horizons

TUI Horizons is a development programme for middle managers who have been identified as management talent with the potential to take up senior general management positions across the Group.

TUI Horizons is run as a virtual business school, using a number of external experts and internal specialists from across the Group covering business topics including Tourism and the Business Environment, Strategy and Finance. During 2009, the programme ran three times, with 65 managers participating.

In 2010, we plan to extend the scope of TUI Horizons. In addition to the core modules, we will offer a number of one-day master classes on specific subjects that will provide ongoing opportunities for learning and networking.