Building Change Agents Through Immersive Development

Challenge:

Amcor, a global leader in packaging with roots dating back to 1860, evolved from an Australian papermaker to a diversified manufacturer supplying specialized, safe, and sustainable packaging solutions to the world’s best-known consumer and healthcare brands. With products touching every 11th item consumers encounter, Amcor recognized the need to inject fresh, diverse talent into its leadership pipeline. The company established the Accelerated Career Development Program (ACDP), recruiting exceptional talent through highly competitive assessment for four-year rotations in Sales or Marketing roles.

The challenge was creating meaningful touchpoints that would develop these high potentials into fluent business leaders while building an empathic, mutually supportive community capable of driving Amcor’s transformation agenda across a complex global matrix organization.

Solution:

For its first ACDP-cohort in 2015, Amcor selected WDHB to be the design and delivery partner for an onboarding session in Zurich. WDHB built a diverse program developing original formats for Amcor-specific materials, integrating relevant outside-in perspectives and providing platforms for community-building and reflection among the ACDP team.

The mix of internal contents, external keynotes and company exchanges, workshops, peer-to-peer coaching as well as individual and collective reflection was a perfect match to the group’s needs. The combination of WDHB’s signature Learning Expeditions and components of its Development offerings has become a blueprint for annual collocations at Amcor’s international locations such as Chicago, Miami and Singapore.

From onboarding to the annual meetups and the final graduation, the collocations for the ACDP cohorts have become landmark events in the career path at Amcor with consistently high stakeholder appraisals. It’s where they take a breather from the demanding environment of their everyday duties, reconnect among peers, reflect on their learnings and chart the path for months to come.

Moreover, an ingenious mix of internal and external components has allowed these sessions to become important platforms to react to changes in the environment and Amcor strategy and inject inspiration ranging from global macro-trends and industry evolutions to contemporary management and leadership practices.

The result:

• Multi-year partnership designing onboarding and annual collocations for Accelerated Career Development Program (ACDP)
• Hybrid format combining Learning Expeditions with development offerings across global locations including Zurich, Chicago, Miami, and Singapore
• Consistently high stakeholder appraisals establishing collocations as landmark career events

“The level of actionable knowledge you gain by engaging intensively with top business minds from other industries cannot be acquired in a classroom. As a participant, WDHB’s programs have helped me evolve my mindset and further develop the way I impact our organization.”

Carlos Trubasz, Strategic Marketing Manager, Amcor