MadeBrave Case Study - Diversity, Equality & Inclusion

MadeBrave is a global strategic brand agency who exist to inspire creativity in everyone so that they can bring their best ideas to life.

The Challenge

With values such as Amigos Without Egos, Be Your Weird Self and To Infinity & Beyond, it’s safe to say that global strategic brand agency MadeBrave aims to put their people at centre stage. As they continued to grow in both talent & clients who are based globally, MadeBrave were seeking some solutions to enhance their ability to leverage diversity and create truly inclusive workplaces that all people can belong to. 

Solution

Sceptics would argue that “Diversity Training” is difficult to get right, so we were very cautious to steer away from solutions that may look good from the outside but if they are not delivering behavioural change then these could be seen as token gestures. 

Therefore, we looked at the core skills required to both lead & live in an inclusive workspace, and following a whole agency launch to inspire, set context and build momentum, we then delivered sessions designed to build skills in Emotional Intelligence, Psychological Safety & Global Mindset.  

At each session, the MadeBrave team were encouraged to create actions and commitments to begin leveraging DE&I efforts and crystallise the impact that every person has to create a workspace of belonging. 

Impact

How did Connect Three help make a difference? 

Connect Three are excellent at helping us to slow down and think about what sort of results we want to see, or what impact we want to have and then designing sessions to really enhance our opportunity to achieve our goals. We tend to move at one million miles an hour! 

What was unique about the support? What did we bring that was unique that our competitors couldn’t have provided?

Katy is a great facilitator, sessions were delivered in the right tone and at the right pace with just the right amount of discussion and team interaction to ensure we were fully engaged.  Delivering sessions remotely to over 40 individuals is not an easy task! 

How has this support helped you against business performance measures?

Since the sessions, we’ve been working on creating our own cultural eco-system map which promotes a truly inclusive and belonging workplace and our team can refer to.   

These fundamental behavioural skills lay the foundations for operating with freedom, trust and respect (the principles that underpin all of our practical working policies), and only with an understanding of these and real consideration within policy and practice – can we truly make space to live and breathe our values. 

Clearly setting out the behavioural skills which lay the foundations for the successful adoption and implementation of our values gives us very clear and measurable indicators when it comes to benchmarking individual contribution performance. 

What changes have you seen?

Since the series of workshops, the biggest change we’ve seen is more open dialogue around the topics in question and an understanding of the shared responsibility we have to create the type of workplace we want for our team.  Making space to talk about creating safe spaces for sharing ideas, speaking up without fear of judgement and taking time to understand our own motivators and emotions, means we’re starting to see this frequently when engaging with each other. Empowering our team to pause and ask do I feel comfortable speaking candidly right now, if not why not? Am I aware of what’s driving my own emotions right now and am I able to manage those for the situation I’m in and the relationships in question?  

Now we are operating on a global level, the final session on Developing a Global Mindset really helped us to understand the nuances of not only different cultures and certain biases we may have, but how these cultures operate in a business capacity.  Exploring the Culture Map has been hugely helpful when engaging with our global clients and the types of considerations we should be making when onboarding new clients. How do these cultural differences impact ways of working such as expectations around giving and receiving feedback, internal sign off processes at their side, cultural differences around punctuality and deadlines etc. An understanding of these allows us to anticipate our clients’ needs but more importantly, to know to consider them in the context of their culture right from the get-go.

The feedback we’ve had to date (we get our feedback throughout 1-1’s, team surveys & general discussion) is really encouraging and our team have expressed interest in learning more in this area. Which is great because we’ve really only just dipped our toe in – we have so much work to do in this area and going forward these areas will be a key feature in essential learning for all new team members as well as more specific learning in a variety of areas as highlighted by our internal diversity, equality & inclusion action group. 

Testimonials

"These sessions have been far more valuable than we ever could have realised. From the outset Connect Three were instrumental in helping us take the right approach for this important area of learning. It’s often hard to know where to start for something so significant so it was great to take it right back to the fundamentals to help us understand ourselves as humans first and foremost, and the things can influence our emotions, behaviours and ultimately the way we interact with one another.
"During the sessions, we were able to take the time to look inward as individuals and as teams, to think about the space we create for one another and how we can truly live and breathe our values. We have always been fully invested in creating values which we believe in and actually mean something.
"So many company values are on a list somewhere and get forgotten about and that is something we’ve always worked hard to avoid at MadeBrave. From getting the values up on the walls or bringing them to life through song and artist collaborations, our aim has always been to make sure that our team believes in them and can see and feel them in action.
"During these sessions, we quickly realised that to ask our team to truly ‘Be Their Weird Self’ or to operate as ‘Amigos without Egos’ and ‘Be Brave’ we have to create an environment that enables and proactively champions the behaviours that facilitate these values. To truly create that sense of belonging and inclusion, which then promotes equality and facilitates diversity – we have to start by understanding ourselves."
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