Gildan is one of the world’s largest vertically-integrated manufacturers of basic apparel with over 50 000 employees worldwide. The Company controls almost every step in the manufacturing process, from raw materials to finished garments. Gildan uses CoachingOurselves, the approach created by Henry Mintzberg and Phil LeNir, as part of their leadership development program for managers with over 113 participants, in more than 8 countries.
We Spoke with Gildan’s Global Director Organizational Development. to learn more about their success using CoachingOurselves globally.
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So, how is it going so far?
We are very satisfied! The leadership development program has surpassed our expectations with a huge satisfaction rate and good transfer of learning on the job. It was a big endeavor to cover all sites globally and pilot this program at distance. CoachingOurselves is a big part of this success; the peer-learning groups added a lot of value to the program and are an effective and appreciated aspect of our program! It really is a great addition to the program for us.
Can you explain a little bit your program?
Our program is called “Leading the Gildan Way”. It sets the bar for a selected group of managers in terms of leadership expectations and supports them in strengthening the competencies and skills set they need to continuously be better managers. The program includes sessions related to leading people and teams, managing performance, leading change and communications, leading with a mindset of diversity and inclusion and becoming champions at developing others.
The program is divided into five modules, which include face-to-face customized content, designed inhouse, and at distance Harvard Management and CoachingOurselves topics.
We ran our program with a first cohort of 113 managers globally. We have participants in Los Angeles, Montreal, Barbados, Nicaragua, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Mexico and China. At first it seemed like a challenge to deal with teams all over the globe, but the beauty of CoachingOurselves is not only that the content is exceptional, but it works perfectly at a distance.
Why did you start with CoachingOurselves?
Four 
years ago, our focus was on establishing strong common values across the organization and extracting the key competency framework that would serve as the base for our leadership development efforts. Our intention was to build a program that will help our leaders to develop specific competencies and it was important for us that the program provides participants with a great and rich learning experience. We looked at many solutions and it was clear the CoachingOurselves was able to meet all of our needs.
How was it to deploy CoachingOurselves in a global organization like GILDAN?
The rollout worked out great! We sent the content to our HR/OD colleagues globally and some of them were able to cover the content in person while others presented it over Webex.
We have a group in the US with 42 participants. The biggest challenge in this location was to get everyone in the same room. For other sites, the teams were much smaller. CoachingOurselves is well adapted to different group sizes, which was definitely a benefit for us.
We started by getting all our HR business partners trained at a distance by CoachingOurselves, so they could take on the role of facilitators. It was a ‘train the trainer’ certification so that our HR teams felt well equipped to deploy the program in all our facilities.
What are the next steps?
To date, we have covered 1/5 of all the population of managers that would benefit from this program. Eventually, we wish to expand the program to a second and then a third cohort.
In the next phase, we are considering implementing CoachingOurselves in development initiatives for other groups of employees, such as our High Potential Employees. We know that CoachingOurselves definitely needs to be part of it!
