Bosses at supermarket giant Morrisons have lent their business expertise to a Bradford charity after seeing first hand the work its does helping people beat drug addictions As part of a leadership programme, a group of managers, including communications head Julian Bailey, spent five days with the Bridge project, working with its senior staff to devise ways it could become more efficient.

They then drew up a list of recommendations on how to tackle funding and performance management issues, which are now being implemented.

Jon Royle, chief executive of the Bridge charity, encouraged more companies to try the project, which is run through Common Purpose, an international not-for-profit organisation that runs leadership development courses mixing people from the private, public and not-for-profit sectors.

He said: “Our clients really valued the experience and they really felt valued and respected. We are an organisation with 70 staff and Morrisons has tens of thousands of staff, so to have that expertise embedded with us for a week was great.

“We couldn’t normally afford that kind of expertise. We set them the challenge of helping more of our clients move through treatment more quickly to become drug-free.

“They helped show us how to engage with the public and gave us a whole set of improvement plans on how to use customer service and performance management with rewards and recognition.

“It is such a great idea and I know a lot of businesses are looking to improve their leadership capability.”

Mr Bailey said: “It was an eye-opening experience. It was about us understanding the enormous challenges of getting people clean and staying clean, which is just as challenging.

“It was very helpful in a way that other leadership courses are not and personally we learned an enormous amount about the challenges that Bridge faces.

“There is the issue of funding, performance management and how should it grow as an organisation.

“I think it has changed all our views on drug education. In a retail business drug addicts and the accompanying problem of shoplifting is an enormous one, and one as a business we face every day. The challenge is we are thinking of what needs to be done to deal with that.