SumUp's Journey with Professional Coaching at Scale

The Challenge

SumUp has implemented professional coaching on a local scale, as part of its leadership development offering, so the business had already seen the benefits of coaching for both aspiring and established leaders. However, the geographical distribution of its leaders has been a challenge that its local network of independent coaches couldn’t solve.

SumUp is committed to supporting individualized leadership development, both on a personal and professional level. Providing employees with a confidante who is outside the business but still an expert in their field, is the best way to create a safe environment, where SumUp leaders can deep dive into their development needs and explore solutions. SumUp needed to expand its leadership development offering to be able to operate at scale, without compromising on quality.

The Result

SumUp’s People Team carried out some internal assessments to identify leaders who would benefit most from working with a coach, and invited a first cohort of participants for the programme. As an investment from the business, participation was entirely voluntary, and introduced as part of SumUp’s wider leadership development programme.

The current working conditions imposed during the global coronavirus pandemic are presenting a unique set of challenges for leaders, and it is a particularly important time to look after mental wellbeing and practice mindfulness. With all the disruption and change, there are a lot of expectations on a leader to have the answers and lead the way.

But everyone is dealing with this situation for the first time – it’s ok to have doubts, or not know all the answers. This has presented an opportunity for SumUp’s participants to get a new perspective from their coach and talk through their concerns and challenges.

SumUp will collect feedback from participants on where they felt the coaching was most useful, and the business will look at how best to integrate digital coaching into its global leadership development portfolio.