"The business cannot grow unless our people grow"

- John Dahlsen

Dahlsens is a family-owned supplier of building materials in Australia, and the largest builder focused merchant in Victoria and NSW. With over 140 years in operation and 35 trade stores and manufacturing sites across Australia and over 1,000 employees, Dahlsens is a unique Australian business and employer. 

As a family business with a strong focus on developing people to support customers and community, Dahlsens takes significant pride in its training, ensuring people are continuously growing and learning to keep up with the ever-changing building industry. Dahlsens had also undertaken some recent acquisitions and mergers and so aligning what great leadership looked like across these new areas of the business was critical for integration and success. 

In this context, Dahlsens approached Spring Point to help create an impactful Leadership Development Program. Centered on strengthening leadership practices and establishing a community of leadership across the country to support a strong growth agenda, we partnered with Dahlsens to co-design and deliver a bespoke program that redefined what it means to be an exceptional leader at Dahlsens. 

WHAT WE DID

Spring Point supported Dahlsens to create a holistic leadership offering, to help define, assess, and develop leadership, based on our science based and practice proven solutions. Our partnership commenced with the co-creation of a Leadership Capability Framework, based on the Spring Point PerformX framework, and tailored to the Dahlsens workforce. 

With this foundation in place, we then co created the Leadership Foundations Program, which included our Accelerated Solution Design (ASD) approach – our collaborative and interactive way to designing leadership experiences at pace, balancing best practice with our client’s unique context. This was further enhanced by the use of the Spring Point LeaderX 360, to help participants gain deep insights on their leadership profile, relative to the framework, and inform how best to engage the development journey ahead. 

Oriented to the co-designed Leadership Capability Framework, the Leadership Foundations program included the following signature elements: 

• Development of an Activation Session and launch pack to support communications, and engage participants upon commencement of the program​ 
• Launch of LeaderX 360 Leadership (Spring Point’s science and practice based assessment tool) Assessment to gather perspectives on current and desired capability 
• Creation of eLearning primers to support engagement with key content 
• Design and development of the immersive leadership workshops – including content, facilitator guides, workbooks and feedback forms for 4 modules 
• Development of learning tools and takeaways for the workshops 
• Design and development of structured learning transfer activities, peer-to-peer group coaching and supporting activity guides. 

We facilitated the ‘pilot’ program in January 2023. 

OUTCOMES

With the program launching in January 2023, the outcomes are still to be fully realised, however initial feedback on the pilot program has been extremely positive.

WHAT'S NEXT?

Spring Point will continue to manage the facilitation of the Leadership Foundations Program for the ‘enhancing’ cohort with Dahlsens, including monitoring the outcomes and program impact into the future.

Spring Point will also support future iterations of the Leadership Foundations program for Dahlsens ‘emerging’ and ‘extending’ leader cohorts.