Leadership

Leadership is shaped in everyday actions and developed together

At K Group, successful leadership is built on strong everyday practices and behaviors. Leading effectively means creating meaningful connections, engaging constructively with people, inspiring others, and providing clear and continuous feedback. It also requires the ability to understand how to enable success at both individual and team levels. Continuous development of leadership capabilities is therefore essential.

To strengthen leadership competencies, we offer a range of leadership development programs focusing on key areas such as interpersonal skills, coaching capabilities, feedback skills, and change management. In addition to learning through programs and everyday work, we utilize development tools such as coaching, mentoring and 360-degree assessments to support self-awareness and targeted growth among our leaders.

The leadership development journey begins with the Leader@K program for newly appointed team leaders. This three-module program provides a comprehensive foundation covering the leadership role and responsibilities, core competencies, and the most important leadership processes and practices at K Group.

The leadership culture and the success of our leaders are regularly monitored through annual employee engagement surveys. In addition, we continuously seek new ways to support everyday leadership and further strengthen our leadership culture across K Group.

Performance management

Performance management is one of the most important aspects of supervisors' work. Performance management allows us to implement the strategy together and helps us incorporate key strategic topics into our everyday work. We apply the same performance management model throughout the group including both continuous and annual discussions. We give feedback, discuss about goals and plan development as part of our everyday work.

The annual process of performance management is supported with a systematic training offering, providing short and practical learning sessions for the different process phases, covering topics such as target setting, development discussions and mid-year review and performance evaluation.

Listening to the personnel; Continuous development of employee experience

K Voices personnel surveys and pulses are our ways of systematically listening to the experiences of the personnel and measuring the quality of leadership. We utilise the results to develop methods for creating an ever better employee experience.

K Voices personnel survey is conducted in Kesko Group and some K-stores at the same time. The personnel survey addresses such matters as personnel commitment, the personnel's experiences on management work, performance enablement, well-being and psychosocial load. Based on the survey results, the teams prepare an action plan with suggested development measures and, where necessary, are provided with support to develop the way they work. Personnel pulses are used to monitor progress on the themes requiring development, based on the previous survey. They support listening to the team members on an ongoing basis and everyday managerial work by immediate managers.