Defining the Future: How Scottish Rail Holdings Transformed Credibility, Governance, and Strategic Alignment

Scottish Rail Holdings (SRH) is a relatively young organisation, established around three years ago when the Scottish rail network was brought back into public sector ownership. Initially taking over ScotRail operations, they later expanded to include Caledonian Sleeper services. With around 28-30 staff, SRH operates as a holdings company that reports to Transport Scotland, providing oversight and governance for Scotland’s rail operations.

The Challenge

Like many newly formed organisations, SRH faced the fundamental challenge of establishing its identity and purpose in a complex stakeholder environment. As an organisation designed to provide oversight and governance, they needed to clarify their role between Transport Scotland and the operational rail companies.

The leadership team had been recruited for their deep technical skills, but now needed to develop as strategic leaders rather than operational managers. The organisation required clear articulation of its purpose and value within the Scottish transport ecosystem, along with robust systems and processes appropriate for their scale and function.

SRH also needed to establish effective working relationships with both Transport Scotland as their sponsor and ScotRail as their operational entity, ensuring all parties understood the new organisational structure and how it would deliver value.

Appreciating the need for external impartiality as well as deep people expertise, SRH brought in People Puzzles People Director Jacqui Mallin to help the leadership team design and plan a strategic way forward and establish a clear identity and culture. As a young organisation, there was a need to build both internal and external credibility to attract, retain and develop great people, and manage stakeholder relationships effectively in this high stakes industry.

Our approach

Discovery and Foundation

The first phase Jacqui implemented was a comprehensive Discovery exercise, including one-on-one meetings with every member of staff. This validated the organisation’s self-awareness about areas for development and provided a clear foundation for the work ahead, with full buy-in from the wider team.

Following Discovery, Jacqui designed and led a full offsite visioning workshop bringing all SRH staff together, including the chair of the board and CEO. The interactive day focused on collectively creating the organisation’s strategy on a page and initial values work, ensuring everyone felt involved and heard in shaping SRH’s future.

Strategic Development

Building on this foundation, Jacqui worked with the Board on strategic development, taking them through a comprehensive strategy workshop that explored what effective strategy meant for SRH and how to develop it systematically.

This led to an intensive two-day workshop which brought together the Board, executive team, managing directors from ScotRail and Caledonian Sleeper, and the sponsor representative from Transport Scotland. Using People Puzzles’ business strategy toolkit, adapted specifically for SRH’s needs, the workshop covered PESTLE analysis, SWOT assessment, visioning, and values development.

The timing worked well, with new CEO Hannah joining on her second day in post, allowing her to immediately engage with the strategic direction and understand the organisation’s priorities and stakeholder relationships and play a key role in shaping the direction of the organisation.

Implementation and Delivery

The strategic work culminated in a six-month implementation project. The outcomes included a comprehensive business strategy that was presented to Transport Scotland and enthusiastically endorsed by the board as the best strategy they had received.

Working in partnership with Head of People and Culture Amanda, Jacqui also developed a people strategy that aligned with the business objectives. Additionally, three days were spent with the executive team using organisational design methodology to create an optimised operating model for the business.

The people strategy was presented to the SRH board at the end of March and approved without amendments. A final values workshop with the broader team incorporated all previous stakeholder input to create the definitive organisational values.

Impact

The transformation established SRH’s clear identity and strategic direction during its critical formation period. The new CEO Hannah demonstrated excellent openness to development, regularly seeking feedback and showing strong leadership capability. Amanda has since been promoted, reflecting the solid foundations built in people and culture development.

The organisation now has clarity about its purpose, credible strategies that stakeholders have confidence in, and leadership that understands its strategic role. For an organisation operating in Scotland’s transport infrastructure, having clear identity, strategy, and values has been essential in establishing credibility and effectiveness.

A spokesperson for SRH said, “Having Jacqui there to guide us through a structure sequence really helped us to get the whole team aligned and resulted in a much deeper understanding and clarity of our role and purpose as an organisation. That clear identity has helped us build great relationships with stakeholders and unions, and has put us in a strong position to develop our own vision as we grow.”

 

SRH continues to develop as an important part of Scottish public transport, with strong endorsement of the People Puzzles approach and further development work being considered.