Symmetra is very excited to announce that we have just won the coveted Brandon Hall Group™ GOLD award for excellence in the Best Leadership Development category for our Inclusive Leadership Programme, Optimising Global Executive Inclusive Leadership Capability with the World Food Programme.
“The 2025 Excellence Award recipients represent the pinnacle of achievement in human capital management. Through their innovative approaches these organizations have not only achieved remarkable outcomes but have also redefined what it means to create truly people-centric workplaces. Our comprehensive evaluation process has identified these programs as the benchmarks for organizational excellence and innovation.” Brandon Hall Group™ CEO Mike Cooke.
“This program was one of the most inspiring and challenging in my 30 years of work in the Inclusion space,” says Heather Price “and therefore winning this award and having it recognised as the gold benchmark internationally is so very meaningful.”
The World Food Programme (WFP) was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 for its efforts to combat hunger, improve conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas, and prevent hunger from being used as a weapon of war. At a management meeting in 2021, WFP made a significant commitment: to strive, over the coming years, to achieve the same gold standard in managing its people internally as it had achieved in serving communities around the world. This commitment came at a time when WFP was facing mounting pressures with global demand for its services rising sharply on an already overstretched system .To thrive in such a volatile and complex environment, WFP recognised that its leaders would need to go beyond traditional management approaches. They would require a distinct set of leadership capabilities – at the core of which were inclusive leadership skills – to navigate a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment.
Symmetra was engaged to work with 300+ inspiring and purpose driven executives from 83 countries over 3 years, many operating in the most challenging, volatile circumstances, to build their inclusive leadership capability. A blended solution was customised together with the Global Lead on Inclusion at WFP Carla Cooper and her Lead Specialist Mumbi Mbocha. The solution consisted of Symmetra’s 360 inclusion assessment, a series of workshops and nudge coaching to embed new inclusion habits.
The impact, thanks to the brilliance of the WFP team and the facilitators and coaches of the global Symmetra team, was transformative, empowering leadership, facing ever-increasing challenges across WFP, to leverage inclusion to do more with less, unlock the potential of every team member, remain agile and adaptive in a VUCA world, and foster innovation in the face of increasing demands and diminishing resources.
By investing in building effective leadership capabilities in its senior leaders, the WFP Executive aimed to unlock its full organisational potential, maximise impact with fewer resources, and sustain the gold standard in delivering on its strategic goals. And this award demonstrates that we achieved the GOLD standard together!
A very big thanks to the WFP Inclusion team and global Symmetra team delivering on every continent, and all those inspiring and committed WFP leaders across the world determined to master how to lead inclusively to maximise their impact on the communities they serve.