Case Study: Building Inclusive Leadership Across 11 Countries

About Specsavers

Specsavers is a global organisation with operations across 11 countries. While many people associate the business primarily with the UK, its workforce spans multiple regions, cultures and time zones.

The organisation has a clear aspiration for inclusion: to create an environment where everyone feels welcome, valued and proud to belong. A strong culture of care and kindness already existed within the business, and there was genuine enthusiasm for inclusion. However, many leaders and managers wanted a clearer understanding of how to translate good intentions into meaningful inclusive behaviours.

To support this ambition, Specsavers looked for an external partner that could bring expertise, challenge existing thinking and deliver a globally relevant development programme.

The Goal

Although inclusion was an established organisational priority, Specsavers recognised several challenges:

• Creating a consistent inclusion learning experience across multiple countries and cultural contexts.
• Helping managers develop practical, everyday inclusive leadership skills.
• Supporting senior leaders to better understand systemic bias, privilege and their influence on organisational culture.
• Ensuring any intervention felt bespoke to Specsavers rather than a generic diversity and inclusion programme.

The organisation needed a partner who could balance global consistency with local relevance while encouraging honest reflection and sustainable behavioural change.

Specsavers engaged Mix with the aim of:

• Bringing its inclusion goals to life through leadership and management development.
• Equipping managers with practical skills to foster inclusive teams and workplaces.
• Increasing leaders’ awareness of systemic barriers, bias and privilege.
• Creating learning experiences that were culturally relevant across international markets.
• Building confidence amongst leaders and managers to actively promote inclusion throughout the organisation.

What We Did

Mix worked closely with stakeholders across Specsavers’ global business to build a deep understanding of the organisation’s culture, values, aspirations and inclusion challenges. This discovery phase included conversations with stakeholders from multiple regions and functions, alongside a review of existing people data, including engagement survey findings and other internal insights. Mix also took time to understand Specsavers’ extensive learning and development offering to ensure any new content would complement and build upon existing resources, frameworks and cultural priorities rather than duplicate them.

Recognising the complexities of a global workforce, Mix developed and tested a pilot programme before wider implementation. The pilot brought together representatives from the UK, North America, Northern Europe and Australia/New Zealand (ANZ), providing valuable feedback on both content and delivery. This enabled the team to identify opportunities for localisation, refine language and examples, and ensure the programme resonated across different cultural contexts rather than reflecting a single-country perspective.

The approach also involved challenging existing assumptions, introducing external best practice and encouraging honest reflection about inclusion at all levels of the organisation.

Mix’s approach helped create a globally consistent programme that maintained local relevance, resulting in learning experiences that felt both meaningful and applicable for participants wherever they were based.

“It didn’t feel like an off-the-shelf diversity and inclusion development offer. It felt like they’d really faced into our challenges and our opportunities.”

Steven Evans, Head of Wellbeing and Inclusion, Specsavers

Overcoming Global Complexity

One of the key challenges was designing a programme suitable for a global audience while ensuring cultural relevance across multiple territories. Diversity and inclusion learning can sometimes be overly influenced by the culture in which it was created, reducing its effectiveness elsewhere.

Mix addressed this challenge by testing content with different regions and adapting the programme to ensure it resonated across varied cultural contexts.

Another challenge involved creating learning experiences for two very different audiences. Managers required practical skills and tools, while senior leaders needed opportunities for reflection and deeper exploration of systemic issues. The dual-pathway approach enabled both groups to receive development suited to their responsibilities and influence.

The Solution

Mix developed two distinct learning pathways tailored to different audiences within Specsavers.

Inclusion and Systemic Change for Senior Leaders

For senior leaders, the programme took a deeper and more reflective approach.

Sessions focused on:

• Systemic bias.
• Privilege.
• Leadership responsibility.
• Identifying and removing organisational barriers to inclusion.

Participants were asked to reflect on their leadership style and consider the practical changes they could make to improve inclusion throughout the organisation. The sessions were intentionally thought-provoking and challenged leaders to examine their role in creating equitable outcomes.

Mix expert facilitators delivered the programme via highly interactive workshops on Teams.

Inclusive Leadership for Managers

For operational managers, the focus was on practical application and everyday leadership behaviours.

Mix and Specsavers jointly defined expectations of inclusive managers, then explored specific actions and behaviours that would help managers demonstrate these expectations.

The programme helped managers understand:

• How to create inclusive team environments.
• How to demonstrate inclusive behaviours consistently.
• How to contribute to a culture of belonging.
• How to apply inclusion in everyday decision-making and people management.

To help sustain learning beyond the workshops, Mix also developed an Inclusive Leadership Toolkit for managers, including micro e-learnings, conversation cards and practical cheat sheets. These resources provided ongoing support and helped leaders translate learning into everyday action.

Due to the scale of Specsavers’ retail network, it was essential to work collaboratively with the in-house learning team to create a sustainable model for delivery. Mix designed the programme as a train-the-trainer solution, supported by comprehensive facilitator guidance, briefing materials and practical tools, including Common Objections crib sheets. Facilitators attended in-person training sessions where they could test the content, refine their approach and receive coaching from Mix’s inclusion specialists. This ensured they felt confident facilitating often-challenging conversations while maintaining consistency and impact across the global manager population.

What changed?

The programme generated strong engagement and positive feedback from participants across the organisation.

Key Outcomes

• 94% of leaders reported feeling more prepared and more confident to bring diversity and inclusion to life within their teams.
• Leaders and managers became active advocates for inclusion, helping to embed learning beyond the workshop environment.
• Participants consistently described the learning as practical, relevant and immediately applicable to their day-to-day leadership responsibilities.
• The programme helped people understand not only why inclusion matters, but also how they could make a difference personally.
• Feedback was positive from across the organisation, including senior leadership and board-level stakeholders.
• The programme surfaced organisation-wide themes and opportunities that were subsequently discussed with the Specsavers Board, helping inform future inclusion priorities.

Next Steps: From Programme to Ongoing Partnership

The partnership generated valuable insights beyond the immediate training programme.

By listening to participants and identifying emerging themes throughout delivery, Mix helped Specsavers uncover additional opportunities and challenges relating to enhancing a culture of inclusion. Hayley Barnard, Mix’s CEO, was invited to share these insights directly with the Specsavers Board, whose commitment to creating an inclusive culture meant they were keen to act on the opportunities being surfaced. These insights created a strong foundation for future collaboration and informed the next phase of the organisation’s inclusion strategy.

Mix continues to provide senior leadership sessions for new starters and has since worked alongside Specsavers and a specialist creative agency to design and deliver an innovative global culture change campaign focused on three priority areas identified through the learning programme. Rather than relying on a traditional training approach, the campaign combined personal storytelling, expert perspectives, self-reflection activities and interactive quizzes within a series of engaging digital magazines. Featuring role models from across Specsavers’ global business, the content encouraged colleagues to explore different perspectives, strengthen inclusive behaviours and increase cross-cultural collaboration across teams and markets.

This work demonstrates Mix’s commitment to looking beyond learning delivery alone. By gathering insight, identifying patterns and translating feedback into practical action, Mix helped Specsavers build on the momentum created through its leadership development programme and embed inclusion more deeply within everyday culture.

Specsavers’ willingness to continually listen, learn and invest in its people has been central to this success. It is this sustained focus on culture, leadership and employee experience that has contributed to the organisation being recognised as one of the world’s best workplaces in the ‘Great Place to Work’ global list.

“It felt like a partnership. Mix challenged some of our own assumptions of our organisation, but also brought loads of wonderful external context about what other organisations were doing that might work for us.”

Steven Evans, Head of Wellbeing and Inclusion, Specsavers