Partnerships

Over the last decade, we’ve developed effective and sustainable relationships with our partner organisations. They bring a range of resources and expertise to our member organisations. We encourage and facilitate direct work between our partners and member organisations. This direct work provides efficient access to specialist skills and resources – delivering tangible outcomes.

Foundation of Light – Official charity of Sunderland AFC

“Our vision is to create better opportunities and better lives for our communities.”

For any organisation wanting to adopt a strategic and ambitious approach to supporting their local communities, then having access to the team from the Foundation of Light will add value and greater insight.

The Foundation of Light is truly a great organisation, supporting families across their local communities.

We hold Best Practice events throughout the year for LDC member organisations.

Nissan car plant, Sunderland

The team at Sunderland has supported the LDC for well over a decade. Our Founder has made over 70 visits to Nissan during this time. We organise a series of day visits to the Sunderland plant, and this provides an inspirational benchmarking experience – operational excellence, training infrastructure, safety dojo, employee selection, cultural interventions, and the role of the supervisor. The Sunderland L&D team provides direct support to member organisations.

The day visit covers a range of areas and is a building block for further research and implementation of new ideas:

  • Recruitment Centre, which allows us to observe the selection process for manufacturing staff
  • Standard Operating Procedures
  • Continuous Improvement – Tools & Techniques
  • The Kaizen process
  • Role of the supervisor – including a visit to a supervisor’s zone
  • Shift Changeover
  • Approach to training – including the assessment of competency
  • Safety Dojo – an interactive training method around the 10 safety behaviours at Nissan
  • The training and development infrastructure
  • Cascading of objectives
  • Audit process

The LDC now has access to all the training & development courses offered at the Sunderland plant. We use the day visits to communicate these opportunities and help member organisations identify potential gaps in their own training and development infrastructure.

Durham University Business School

We have worked with the International Centre for Leadership and Followership (ICLF) for the last 6 years. We are fortunate to have access to this world class resource, working with the latest thinking and research around leadership and followership. Our academic colleagues at Durham University Business School push the boundaries of what we know about effective leadership and followership, and by working with the LDC, we generate novel, state of science approaches for our member organisations.

We are currently running a collaborative project with some of our manufacturing organisations. The project is looking at leadership development for first line leaders and designing a winning strategy. The team from ICLF is providing academic and research expertise to support the project.

Simply Culture

Mark Dewhurst is the business owner of Simply Culture. An experienced corporate leader who we have worked with for over a decade. Mark is the lead for our Best Practice Group – Building an Intentional Culture. Mark is also a member of the LDC Leadership Group.

Find out more here.