Home > News > June 2004 > 10-Jun-2004

Peter Jones ‘Face The Music’. . .and hit all the right notes

John Matchett Limited (JML) has just run two‘Face the Music’ team training events for Peter Jones, the Sloane Square department store and raised thousands of pounds for charity in the process.

Peter Jones, the Chelsea department store that is part of the John Lewis Partnership has been undergoing a complete refurbishment programme costing £107m, which is due to complete this summer. The shop wanted to prepare its sixty-four person management team for future challenging projects and targets they will face, once the refurbished store becomes fully operational. So it was decided to send them all on the ‘Face the Music' leadership course run by JML.

The first of the two sessions held earlier this year had twenty-nine managers drawn from a wide range of departments and specialities within the store. They designed and developed the CD cover and insert, and produced a full marketing plan including website development for promotion. They then wrote, rehearsed and recorded the tracks.

The teams between them raised £10,000 in sponsorship for the 10-track music CD which will now be sold to partners in the Group and will also be available to the general public, with a view to raising £25,000 for charity.

The charity nominated to receive the money is ‘Whizz-Kidz' a group set up to provide mobility equipment for disabled children. David Pastor, Fundraising Director for the charity said: "Whizz-Kidz is absolutely delighted that Peter Jones and The Matchett Group chose to support the charity as the benefactor of a recent management training weekends. This will enable Whizz-Kidz to support many more disabled children, giving them the freedom of independent mobility."

The results went way beyond anything that JML has witnessed in events such as these. JML Principal Consultant Michael Brown explains: "This group took Face the Music to new limits. To raise so much money in one day and then plan how to raise a further £25,000 is unheard of in 3 years of running these events.“

Face the Music will now be marketed as an event designed to unlock funds for charity, and JML will quite seriously ask teams to find £10,000 in sponsorship during the event and a further £10,000 afterwards.

Face the Music is designed to engage the learners in a powerful collective experience, which will produce high volumes of behavioural information about a team and the individuals in it in a short space of time. It also provides long term learning because of the emotions involved: groups find that they are connecting with what they learnt months or years after the event.

Although marketed as a Leadership course in this case the event functioned much more effectively as a Team Bonding exercise. How effective was it? Deputy Managing Director Paul Hunt sums up: "The whole object was to bring everyone to the boil at the same time for the completion of the renovation work. We've achieved that."

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