Uncommon Leadership Coaching
Challenge
Uncommon is a meat-free biotech business. In 2023 they raised $30 million in Series A funding, propelling them forwards on their mission to cultivate an innovative, remarkable, and deliciously creative way to feed the planet. Their ambition is huge – to reduce traditional meat consumption by having a 5% share of the global pork market by 2030.
As the business scales up at pace there was a need to equip functional leaders with the skills and self awareness to both manage themselves and lead their teams through a period of rapid growth. These leaders brought significant technical expertise but were often new to line management and there was a need to shift from delivering themselves to delivering through their teams.
Programme
CoCreate was selected from a competitive pitch process based on a combination of our experience in tech and scale-ups, our customer centric approach and the quality of our coaches. Our brief was to provide bespoke 1:1 coaching to 7 functional leaders from across the business.
Key challenges these leaders were facing included a lack of confidence to speak up in Exec meetings, how to effectively present scientific information in different ways to influence stakeholder, not knowing how to break the cycle of unhelpful conversations, how to performance manage team members who have until recently been peers.
The sessions provided the time and space for leaders to reflect and explore their leadership challenges, balancing supportive dialogue with stretch coaching and practical skill development to enable participants to translate their learning into action.
Impact
Through the coaching, the leaders…
- Increased in self-awareness, particularly around their values and strengths and how they can lean into these when presenting or influencing.
- Rehearsed 1:1 conversations and public speaking.
- Built their confidence to constructively challenge and manage upwards.
- Explored how to have effective conversations about expectations and performance.
- Re-energised and increased clarity on role and responsibilities
Client experience
The CoCreate team ran a coaching programme for our mid-level managers group, focused on building increased leadership versatility and effectiveness that they could apply in a fast-paced, demanding and complex environment. The feedback from our manager cohort was universally positive and we’ve seen increased levels of independence and confidence from the group. Apart from the care the CoCreate coaches took to really understand the context for our company and the challenges faced by our managers, what really stood out was the high level of trust they quickly built with a very diverse group and the highly tailored approach they took to maximise their impact in a short space of time.
Martin Hancock, Chief People Officer, Uncommon
