Unipart

How Unipart Powers ‘The Unipart Way’ with Growth Mindset

Background

Unipart is a supply chain performance improvement partner that designs, makes, moves, and improves components in its customers’ supply chains, keeping their operations working better, for longer. 

Unipart’s 8,500+ colleagues serve customers in multiple sectors, including automotive, rail & public transport, healthcare, aerospace, defence, technology, consumer & retail, industrials and construction.

A Great British private company with operations at 80+ sites in 22 markets, Unipart has been headquartered in Oxford, UK, for more than 50 years. Unipart’s ambition is to be the driving force behind efficient, resilient, and sustainable supply chains.

Central to Unipart’s culture, brand and approach to working is “The Unipart Way”, a long-standing philosophy underpinned by a structured set of tools and techniques for operational excellence and knowledge management. Its purpose is to unlock employee potential and deliver excellence for clients.

Challenge

Unipart identified a strong link between The Unipart Way and growth mindset, recognising that how people think, work, and how they behave drives continuous improvement.

As part of a wider objective to reinvigorate The Unipart Way, Unipart partnered with Matthew Syed Consulting to deepen understanding of growth mindset and embed it within their framework.

A key priority was collaboration; Unipart wanted to break down siloes and better harness skills, knowledge, and experience across the organisation.

Longer term, Unipart wanted self-sufficiency – equipping leaders with the tools and capability to cascade growth mindset throughout the organisation.

Solution

Over 24 months, Unipart worked with Matthew Syed Consulting to embed growth mindset tangibly into systems, language and leadership behaviours, supporting the successful revitalisation of The Unipart Way.

1. Measuring mindsets

The journey began with the 10-person Executive Leadership Team (ELT) plus the next 72 senior leaders completing Mindset Advantage, Matthew Syed Consulting’s growth mindset psychometric that measures the nine behaviours and the six cultural aspects associated with growth mindset.

• Each individual received a personal report of their mindset strengths and areas for development, including how these manifest in day-to-day behaviours and ways of thinking.
• The group gained team-level insights, including cultural strengths and blind spots, benchmarked against performance norms.
• This provided a clear starting point for designing and delivering the most impactful development interventions for the group.

2. Reframing thinking

Using the first Mindset Advantage insights, MSC delivered a programme of workshops and training. The programme also included a keynote from Matthew Syed which covered key themes of effective collaboration and thinking differently, inspiring the leadership group and sparking new ideas. Sessions focused on Unipart’s priority areas, particularly harnessing collective intelligence and improving cross-functional collaboration.

3. Building internal capability

To ensure sustainability, Unipart invested in in-house accreditation:

• Mindset Advantage Accreditation: Selected team members trained to interpret and debrief results internally.
• Growth Mindset Techniques: Facilitators accredited to run workshops, including the Pre-Mortem technique – a method which uses prospective hindsight to uncover risks, reduce overconfidence and encourage diverse thinking.

Impact

Measurable mindset shift and a 23 percentage point uplift in collaboration within the leadership group

After 16 months, the ELT and next level of leadership retook Mindset Advantage. 7 of the 9 aspects of growth mindset behaviours improved, with the most significant uplift (23 percentage points*) in collaboration – Unipart’s key focus, enabling more aligned and effective decision-making at the top.

*The proportion of Unipart leaders in the High grade (top 25% of the benchmark) rose from 28% to 51% – a 23‑percentage‑point increase.

The second largest improvement over time (19 percentage points) was in the leaders’ perception of potential, in other words, how leaders think about the potential of others to grow and develop.

“We were delighted with this result, as it reflects the impact of the work we’ve done to break down silos and promote collective learning. It’s clear that these efforts are paying off.”
– Denny Sharman, Director of Organisational Development

Up to 170 risks identified in one workshop using pre-mortem activity

Accredited facilitators guided teams through risk identification on real initiatives, helping reduce the likelihood of failure, improve decision quality, and foster collective accountability.

In Unipart’s first 10 Pre-Mortem activities, there were 135 participants, with each session identifying between 30 – 170 risks.

“By addressing these issues openly and putting mitigating actions in place from the outset, we reduce the likelihood of failure. This approach has helped people take greater accountability and overcome the fear of failure.”
– Denny Sharman, Director of Organisational Development

Pre-mortem analysis led directly to forging integral relationships

A pre-mortem activity proved invaluable prior to a customer renewal process, where the mitigating strategy from the risks identified resulted in engaging a wider array of invested stakeholders early in the renewal timeline and uncovering the complex matrix of global influences impacting our key contact. As a result, the team proactively forged critical international relationships and engineered a win-win operational shift that drove mutual commercial benefit, while ensuring a highly sustainable, long-term partnership.

Personalised development at scale as Unipart’s most senior leaders share a common growth mindset framework

Leaders across the Executive Leadership Team and wider leadership team completed Mindset Advantage, gaining self-awareness and a shared language to cascade growth mindset throughout the organisation.

Structural changes to support collaboration

To support stronger collaboration and future scalability, Unipart implemented targeted organisational design changes and introduced more consistent, standardised ways of working. These structural shifts strengthened communication across the business, formalised communities and cross-functional working groups, and expanded opportunities for horizontal learning. Together, these changes reduced silos, increased connectivity between teams, and created the conditions for knowledge sharing, collective problem-solving, and faster transfer of ideas across the organisation.

“The Matthew Syed Consulting team has been great throughout the process, and very knowledgeable.”
– Vicki Hooper, Chief People Officer

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