The Leadership Expedition
Transforming a behaviours framework from a forgotten spreadsheet into a creative tool that every leader (and eventually every colleague) wanted to use.
The Challenge
With the values from The Little Book of Love now embedded across the business, Rentalcars.com was ready for the next stage, helping leaders and people managers reconnect with the company's Leadership Behaviours Framework.
The framework itself wasn't new, but in its existing form, an Excel spreadsheet, it was difficult to navigate and almost impossible to engage with. Something that should have been a meaningful development tool had become an afterthought.
Our approach
We started by getting under the skin of the framework, understanding the different behavioural topics, the language, and what good leadership genuinely looked like at Rentalcars.com.
The brief wasn't to rewrite the content, but to make it feel like something worth picking up. That meant finding a creative concept strong enough to carry the whole thing.
The Solution
We reframed the Leadership Behaviours Framework as The Leadership Expedition, an A4 landscape workbook where each topic had its own distinct identity, brought to life through creative design that felt in keeping with Rentalcars.com's unique tone of voice.
Every detail was considered. Each workbook was personalised to the individual receiving it, and numbered on the front cover. Alongside the workbook, we created expedition-style sticker patches to support the launch and onboarding, giving the whole programme a sense of occasion.
The response from leadership was so strong that the decision was made to extend access beyond people managers entirely. We subsequently created a digital version, making the framework available to all 450 colleagues across the business.
The results
The Leadership Expedition became embedded as an ongoing programme rather than a one-off initiative. What started as a brief to make a spreadsheet more engaging, ended as a piece of work that changed how the whole organisation thought about leadership development.
"It started as a spreadsheet. It ended up in the hands of every colleague in the business."
