Growing as a leader

A 9-part animation series to support leadership development

The Air Products leadership development programme trains leaders around the world to support a culture of innovation to achieve the strategic priorities of the company.

A very open brief called for content to show how the leadership training could be used in workplace situations.

Working with senior HR stakeholders through several rounds of discussion and format prototyping, the solution that bubbled to the top was for an interactive animation series with episodes linked to leaderships values and practices. Episodes could be released on a regular schedule to tie in with other activities in the leadership programme.

All of the thinking behind the leadership training is written down in a Leadership Resource Guide, a 165 slide powerpoint file.

So the challenge as a writer was to extract the essence of the leadership values and practices and build them out into succinct content.

Narrative design

The leadership training is oriented around Leadership Values (for example, ‘Lead and Inspire’, or ‘Strategic Mindset’) and Leadership Practices (for example, ‘Drive Accountability and Performance’, or ‘Navigate and Adapt to Change’). Values guide how a leader makes meaning of what is happening, and Practices are the behaviour and actions of they actually do.

A key decision was to focus the story around leaders at the different leadership levels in the business.

So in the series, there are four main characters, from different regions, who are brought together to cooperate on a fictional Project Pegasus: Front-line supervisor Carlos, is a seasoned supervisor from South America; Manager Kathryn in Europe is skilled, but new into her position; Jagdish is an experienced Director in India; and Mei-Lei is at the Executive level, a highly experience global leader based in Asia.

In development, it was clear that the storyworld would need to be grounded in the reality of day-to-day working at Air Products’ sites, otherwise it would not be taken seriously. So the Project Pegasus Taskforce is tasked at finding ways to develop and implement new and more demanding ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) goals. 

The transformation of the business is mirrored by a transformation in the way the task force works together, and how individual members of the task force evolve in their leadership roles.

At the start of the series people are working in silos with poor collaboration, they don’t take accountability for the consequences of their actions, and they refuse to confront difficult situations.

By the end of the series, by using the leadership values and practices, task force members take accountability for their actions, confront poor behaviour, and work well together, no matter their seniority.

Making it

The 9 episode series, with a total run time of just under 1 hour of animation and interactive content, was developed over just 7 weeks and launched in 51 countries and 15 languages.

Agile project management with continuous release and tight deadlines for client feedback and approval was key to the success of this project.

Storyworld, character arcs, concept art, script writing, storyboarding, animation, voiceover talent selection, translation, and build on the learning management system, (LMS) all happened at the same time, coordinated through daily standup meetings, and online project management and collaboration tools.

Animation was drawn by the wonderfully talented Chris Day at Little Creature.

The line drawing style for characters, with coloured cores to represent their internal values, was quick to draw, cost-effective, and could be easily updated as the project evolved.

Interactivity and LMS programming was kept deliberately simple to reduce the impact on the story, animation, and project delivery schedule.

Outcome

The animated characters are very popular across Air Products, showing leaders how they can use the leadership values and practices in their own teams.

The distinctive style of animation, makes the leadership brand stand out in internal company communications and is very recognisable.

Questions, quizzes, polls and other cohort-based activities allow leaders to see their learning in the context of the rest of the cohort and provide inspiration for ongoing conversations with colleagues.

And meeting the leadership values and leadership practices in different stories across the series supports retrieval practice and offers reflection opportunities for learners on the expectations set for them as a leader.

Following the success of the Growing as a Leader animations, a second series was commissioned to continue the story.