LEADERSHIP ASSESSMENT AND DEVELOPMENT
LEADERSHIP
Leadership isn’t something someone does to other people or something that people have done to them. Leadership is something people do together; it's a relationship.
Leadership is a consensual relationship
that emerges
between individuals as a result of interactions
that they choose to give specific meaning
to in the context
in which they are interacting.
This doesn’t mean that helping leaders get better at offering leadership isn’t important - it means that investing in helping them create effective teamwork and a context in which others can flourish and want to follow is also important. Both the leader and those being invited to follow play a part in creating effective leadership. Teamwork is the label we use to describe this process. The team is the immediate context within which the relationship called leadership develops - and the effectiveness of the team sets the limit on how effective a leader can be.
In many organisations and cultures changing demographics are bringing to the fore the reality that leadership has never really been about formal authority; many great leaders have had no formal followers, but have created a network of relationships and formed a movement that has achieved massive change - either withing an organisation or outside of one.
In a world where people are strive to find autonomy, purpose and meaning, everyone has the potential to lead the change they want to see - and smart businesses are empowering them.
For us this means four things that must be taken into account when developing leaders:
- Context counts; off-the-shelf solutions will not provide you with a competitive advantage in your industry;
- Leadership is a relationship that both emerges from and results in effective teamwork, i.e. the delivery of the right things in the right way at the right time;
- Ultimately, the effectiveness of teamwork sets the limit to the effectiveness of the leader;
- Great teamwork isn’t something you leave to chance. Team development isn't something you only do when a problem arises; it is fundamental to your organisation's performance
Investing in leadership development and not investing in helping leaders create great teamwork is like putting a Rolls Royce engine on an ultralight racing bike; individual excellence is unlikely to get you where you want to go.
LEADERSHIP ASSESSMENT
Leadership matters, and context counts. Evidence shows us that assessments that take into account the context in which leaders are working are three times more accurate at predicting leadership potential than generic off-the-shelf assessments. When you're choosing leaders in your business, that really matters.
The leaders you choose have to work within your organisation's culture, structure, politics, processes and systems to create and deliver a successful business strategy. Any serious attempt to identify and assess an individual’s potential to lead in your business and context
needs to reflect that specific
reality.
Our approach is to work with you and use our unique design process to create leadership assessments that accurately
predict the extent to which individuals will provide effective leadership in your business.
LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
Most people understand that personal growth and leadership development depend not only on experience, but also on feedback - whether that feedback be advice and guidance from friends or falling off a bike (reality is great at providing feedback, even though we humans don’t always appreciate it!)
We will work with you to ensure that your future leaders have the opportunity to gain the experiences, feedback and support necessary to help them make their maximum possible contribution, unlocking their potential by:
- Creating a roadmap that shows exactly how your leaders can gain the experiences and feedback they need to maximise their business impact and become candidates for more senior roles;
- Helping you explore/design platforms that will facilitate thought leadership, best practice, networking and tailored learning resources throughout your organisation, so that your leaders can acquire the knowledge they need when they need it;
- Designing and delivering learning experiences such as bespoke business simulations, leadership workshops and Action Learning Sets to help your leaders develop critical business skills and relevant leadership competencies
- Ensuring your leaders develop the leadership mindset they need to deliver results and also the ability to learn from the experience; helping them build a fast, effective reflective practice that will enable them to continuously deepen their self-knowledge, psychological insight and adaptability.
CASE STUDIES _
Tasked with identifying how an organisation of 700 employees in a global pharmaceutical organisation could become more effective, our colleague, Dr. Julia von Onciul, swiftly earned the trust of the leadership team and helped them take a radical approach. The challenge It quickly became apparent to Julia that the departments had developed in silos as part of what can be called ‘natural’ departmental growth, i.e. technical specialists, growing into the roles of managers and then the business leadership, whilst managing their own areas from a specialist, rather inward oriented perspective. As a result the senior leadership team was firefighting; managing their individual departments through day to day challenges. "Leadership" meetings were high-jacked by the need to manage issues that were making the interfaces of departments ineffective. The leadership team was simply not making time to work at a strategic level. What was missing Julia quickly realised what was missing . The first was an overall strategy for the whole organisation and vision setting for its future growth. The second was a leadership structure committed to that vision and supportive of talent movement and development in pursuit of it. Holistic interventions Julia helped the leadership team obtain a more strategic remit and become more effective at managing outside stakeholders. In addition, a new managing team was hand selected - and allowed to mature into their roles before going live. Having split the role of the leadership team in two, both teams were provided with support around communication, team effectiveness and running highly productive meetings. Individuals were coached both for their own development and around their role in the team. These (and other) structural changes were fundamental to allowing talent to grow and in ensuring alignment with new business objectives. Bottom line result As a result of these new leadership structures and the team effectiveness work enabling people to collaborate across the silos more effectively, synergies were created that led to significant savings in procurement costs. The organisation began to pull together towards a common strategy. Julia was given the feedback that as a result of the consultancy and support she had provided several processes had become much more efficient, and the internal and external profiles of the organisation had markedly improved. So much so that this approach and new leadership structure was transferred as best practice to the US leadership team. A comprehensive talent strategy, organisation development, strategic leadership coaching, and a team development approach came together in an holistic intervention that moved the whole organisation forward significantly.
We're working with a diversified global business to help them develop their Managing Directors, General Managers and other senior executives. We've highlighted their individual strengths and development needs in an assessment tailored to the challenges their businesses face, and are coaching them to help every one them fulfill their potential. We've also analysed several years' of the client's talent management data to identify persistent patterns of strengths and weaknesses in their diverse leadership pipelines. This enabled us to offer strategic insights that revealed how the strategy, structures and cultures within the group shape the mind-set and the skill-set of the leaders who emerge at executive level, leading to important conversations about the talent strategies the group needs for the future. The client has told us that we've taken the assessment and coaching of their senior leaders “ to another level ” , and that our strategic insights are “ light years ahead ” of anything they've experienced previously. They've discovered that being willing to take a fresh approach and engage with provocative thinking can add even greater value than expected.