Enhancing Management Capability to Enable Career Ownership at Samsung
Case Study
Context & challenges
Samsung, an international leader in technology, partnered with us to shift career ownership directly into the hands of employees rather than their managers. This talent initiative placed managers at the centre of the shift — equipping them with the tools to empower their teams, who had previously relied on direction from senior members.
The challenge lay in how the programme was framed. While most managers had previously completed sessions on skills like feedback and delegation, this programme needed to reposition those familiar capabilities through the lens of career development. The goal was to help managers understand how to apply these skills strategically, fostering clarity, setting expectation, and encouraging ownership within their teams.
Solution
To tackle the challenge at hand, our management training programme required two things:
A balance of theory and experiential learning.
Clear guidance on how to approach feedback and delegation suitable for career conversations.
Our approach? A full-day workshop that encompassed both. We began by decoding the Why, When, and How of an effective career development conversation. The aim was to equip managers to respond confidently and appropriately to their team’s questions — avoiding false expectations around promotions while reinforcing how individuals can take responsibility of their own growth.
To bring the conversations to life — quite literally — we ran a Forum Theatre session where professional actors intentionally performed a poor example of a conversation between a manager and a team member requesting a promotion that couldn’t be fulfilled. Participants were encouraged to step in, suggest alternative behaviours, identify what went wrong, and highlight language that landed poorly. The actors then replayed the scene using the participants’ corrections, demonstrating how small shifts in approach can transform a challenging conversation into something constructive and engaging.
We also ran dedicated feedback and delegation conversations, where managers worked one-to-one with an actor to navigate a realistic scenario. Participants were encouraged to draw on tools like ‘The Core Components of Delegation’ and the ‘BIRD’ model to structure their approach, helping them practise delivering clear, effective, and career-focussed conversations.
All of these methods worked together to ensure managers left with the skills and confidence to support career ownership within their teams.
Results
When participants say it’s the best training they’ve been on, you know it’s been a success — so much so that Samsung rolled out the training for all 600+ managers in their UK team.
Our approach has strengthened managers’ confidence in holding career conversations, giving them the clarity and support needed to encourage their team members to take accountability for their career ownership and progression. The practical, simulation-based design ensured that managers left with tools they could apply immediately within their teams.
Testimonials
Brilliant feedback keeps coming in for these workshops! Loving working with you all!
The actors are brilliant and truly land the message with the audience!
