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Leadership Development


Mastering your way to the top

Leadership Development

Organic leadership is as old as human life itself. We're evolved to do it genetically and culturally. Even where the bureaucratic machine model of organisation is dominant, the natural system exists in parallel. We are doing it already because it is human nature. Our task is to uncover what people are successfully doing and to help them thrive.

Successful businesses are agile organisms which adapt to their ecological niche. Like a giant ant's nest, beehive, wildebeest migration or shoals of fish, human beings align and coordinate using an inner map and compass:
- This who we are, where come from, where we are and where we're going.
- This is what we care about, what we believe and what we are trying to achieve.
- This is how we serve our customers needs and how we do business.
- This is good and bad, right and wrong, true and false.

You can perceive the map about an inch behind the forehead. The best leaders successfully navigate the territory using their inner compass of logic, reason, intellect, heart, gut, instinct, intuition, emotions, energy, social and spiritual intelligence.

The challenge with more complex organisations is to keep the formal structures and processes as closely aligned to the informal natural human system as possible. The benefits of this are that people are happier, healthier, more effective, better motivated and the organisation is much more adaptable. When treated as human beings, people become more engaged, present and connected. They use their common sense and judgement. They find alignment between their personal values and organisational values.


Our Leadership Development Programme
What kind of leadership will be most effective for you and your business? Who is going to work with whom to do what, where, how and why?

Our programme of workshops, interviews, surveys and a whole system conference ask the question "How can we optimise the leadership of this business?" We facilitate the leaders to discover what you are already doing successfully and distill the best practices, leadership behaviours and culture. We take our clients through a journey which harnesses the group intelligence of the leaders, staff and stakeholders of a business to imagine leadership at its very best, identify what is needed to make that happen, how to measure it and how to implement it. There is the option to discover and implement Authentic Performance Measures for the performance management of leadership.

For example, here are the recommendations arising from our work with a military organisation with 40 leaders of 13 units with 400 staff serving 250,000 service people:
1. Put one person in charge of each business unit
2. Empower leaders with mission command, functional authority and autonomy
3. Hold leaders accountable by measuring Leadership, Teamwork & Performance
4. Establish a Clear Chain of Command up & down
5. Clarify roles & responsibilities
6. Select and develop leaders by meritocracy
7. Establish Leadership assessment, training & coaching
8. Recognise and reward success; manage underperformance
9. Treat people compassionately as human beings
10. Engage & empower staff
11. Promote a culture of learning, fairness and respect
12. Communicate clearly, ideally in person
13. Things individuals can do to improve their leadership
14. Acknowledge and respond to low morale, burnout, cynicism and stress


Benefits

- To identify the major problems and challenges facing the leadership
- To identify excellence and good practice and build on it
- To identify initiatives to improve the quality and effectiveness of the leadership
- To discover and implement Authentic Performance Measures for the leadership
- Harness the intelligence of the leaders, whole system and stakeholders
- Ready-made groups of volunteers willing to staff up practical initiatives
- Increased engagement and buy in
- Empower leaders to be the best they can be
- Ensure that leaders have the necessary authority, power and support to be effective
- Optimise the chain of command and authority
- Clarify roles, responsibilities and organisation
- Determine the preferred way to select and develop leaders
- Decide what leadership assessment, training and coaching is required
- Improve recognition, reward and performance management
- Engage and empower the staff to optimise teamwork
- Improve the culture of leadership and teamwork
- Improve communication
- Identify and respond to low morale, burnout, cynicism and stress


The Methods

We use three methods which bring out the very best in you and your team's leadership: Appreciative Inquiry, Open Space Technology and Authentic Performance Measures.

A. Appreciative Inquiry
The traditional approach to change management is to look for the problem, make a diagnosis, recommend and implement a solution. The primary focus is on what is wrong or broken; since we look for problems, we find them. By paying attention to problems, we emphasise and amplify them. Appreciative Inquiry (AI) starts with the assumption that the business is already up and running with good people doing their best. It has 4 phases:

Phase 1: Appreciate: Identifies its current leadership excellence and good practice

Phase 2: Envision: Imagine ideal leadership; the Rolls-Royce, Heaven on Earth version.

Phase 3: Design: What does that look like in practice? Operationalise it.

Phase 4: Implementation: Volunteers self-organise to plan how to make it happen.

The advantage of AI over the traditional approach to change is that it engages people, brings out the best in them, builds on success and, above all, gets those people who are going to have to implement the change to have a stake in it, take the initiative and feel enthusiastic about making it happen.

Leadership Development


B. Open Space Technology
Open Space Technology was invented by an American pastor called Harrison Owen. For many years he ran a series of traditional conferences which took a huge amount of organisation. Every year, the participant feedback said that the best parts were the informal bits in between the main sessions - the coffee breaks, chatting outside, going for a walk, gathering around the water cooler et cetera. In the end, he thought, why don't I just create a conference which is all open space? Open Space Technology is now a tried and tested method for running a self-organising conference. It is best suited to answering a clear question in a complex system with many stakeholders. The essential thing is to have a question which is genuinely of interest and where the decision-makers are sincerely open-minded to the outcome and want to engage the group intelligence of the whole organisation and its stakeholders.

Participants are invited to step forward at the beginning with the issues, ideas and proposals about which they personally feel most passionate. These ideas are then organised into a series of separate meetings in the conference space. There can be any number of sessions from a couple of hours through till several days depending on the complexity of the question, the number of participants, a number of ideas and the time available. Each meeting has the person proposing the idea and others voluntarily take on the role of timekeeper, note taker and presenter. Participants can freely move between all of the sessions in the style of a bumblebee or a butterfly as they follow their energy and interest. At the end of the session, each of the ideas is presented back to the whole group and the summaries are collated for the conference report.

The advantage of an Open Space is that it enables large groups of people from very different backgrounds, different roles in different opinions to create practical solutions. Those people who are passionate about particular ideas self organise into teams ready to implement them.


C. Authentic Performance Measures
Authentic Performance Measures (APMs) are a business transformation tool for continuous learning, feedback, quality improvement and adaptation. They provide granular transparency and accountability in complex systems. APMs inform strategy, leadership and planning. APMs improve the information available to minimise risks and identify areas of good practice. See our page on APMs for more detail.


Timing

- The schedule is adapted to the needs of the client. We find that it is best to allow 2-4 weeks between each stage of the process to allow time for reflection, digestion, integration and creativity.
- This is short enough to maintain momentum and focus, but long enough to allow conversations to occur and for issues to rise to the surface.


The Process

1. Preparation
- We interview a sample of leaders & stakeholders to get a feel for the state of play and will ask the client to bring us up to speed with the context, priorities and issues.

2. Workshop- Introduction, Diagnosis & Appreciative Inquiry
- Attendance- leaders, managers and senior stakeholders
- Introduction to the Leadership Development Workshops
- Identify the current major problems and challenges for the leadership
- Introduction to Appreciative Inquiry method (see below)
    - What's working well in the leadership?
    - What are the strengths of the leadership at its best?
    - Examples of success and good practice in the leadership
    - Examples of effective interventions to improve the leadership
    - Potential ideas to improve the leadership
    - Envisage optimal leadership
    - Authentic Performance Measures for leadership

3. Staff & stakeholder interviews and survey
- Survey
    - All staff, leaders and selected customers and stakeholders
    - How can we improve leadership?
- Interview a wide and deep sample of colleagues and stakeholders to discover:
    - Examples of success and good practice in the leadership
    - Examples of effective interventions to improve the leadership
    - Potential ideas to improve the leadership
    - Envisage optimal leadership
    - Authentic Performance Measures for leadership

4. Whole System Conference "How can we optimise the leadership?"
- Attendance: all or a large sample of the leaders, staff, customers, stakeholders
- 1 day facilitated self-organising conference using Open Space Technology (See below) to harness the whole system intelligence to answer the question "How can we optimise our leadership?"
- Whole group to give written answer to "Using your own personal and professional judgement, how do you know if the business is well led?"
- Outputs
    - Fresh ideas, worked up, tested, recorded, presented
    - For each individual:
        - Things that I (each individual leader) can do to improve leadership
        - Things that We (each team) can do to improve leadership
        - Things that the leadership/HQ can do to improve leadership
        - Commitments to action:
            - Things I will do differently
            - Things I will invite my team to do differently
            - Things I will propose to the leadership/HQ
    - Ready-made groups of volunteers willing to staff the ideas selected
    - Data for Authentic Performance Measures for the leadership

5. Workshop- Choose & develop the best ideas
- Attendance- leaders, managers and senior stakeholders
- To distill and harvest the best actionable ideas from the Whole System Conference
- To present and discuss the results of their Appreciative Inquiry interviews
- Invite volunteer individuals or teams to work up the ideas into practical proposals

6. Workshop- Practical Proposals Presented & Tested
- Attendance- senior leaders, managers and senior stakeholders
- Things that I (each individual leader) will do to improve leadership and teamwork
- Things that We (each team) will do to improve leadership
- Things that leadership/HQ can do to improve leadership
- Teams to develop and present their proposed interventions to the group
- Group to constructively critically appraise the viability of the proposed ideas

7. Report prepared and presented
- Each leader and group to write up their practical proposals
- Collate into a report with findings and recommendations
- Report submitted to the HQ, all leaders and, if deemed appropriate, the whole staff and stakeholders

8. Action
- HQ to decide which of the things that leadership/HQ can do to improve leadership and to implement as chosen
- HQ to decide whether to implement the Authentic Performance Measures for leadership
- Each individual leader to do to what they have committed to do
- Each team to decide which of the things that they can do to improve leadership and teamwork and to implement as chosen


The Cost

This is a bespoke service which is tailored to the specific client need. The investment required depends upon the size and complexity of the business, the number of stakeholders involved and how well the client staffs up the project internally.

For example:
- We ran our leadership development programme for a business with 40 leaders of 400 staff in 13 business units within an organisation of 250,000 people with domestic and oversee operations. This required 100 consulting days and 3 dedicated members of staff from the client.

- ROI- The cost of the project is likely to be a tiny percentage of the net benefit in increased profits and reduced mistakes especially when annualised for the foreseeable future


Book it

Get in touch for a conversation to see how this might benefit your business.


Adan's executive coaches have decades of experience working at the executive level with leading organizations around the world. We have expertise in leadership, productivity, organizational change, team building, marketing, sales and motivation.

Our on-the-job experience coupled with extensive knowledge of the markets and functional areas enables us to deliver a variety of practical, high-impact presentations that engage, enlighten and entertain.

Featured Experts - Leadership Development

Senior multi-disciplinary corporate and finance professionals with diverse geographic, sector and transaction focuses
Raju Venkataraman
Raju brings 30+ years of rich C-suite experience from the Corporate world; most recently as CFO & Head of Strategy of Walt Disney Company for South East Asia. He has rich cross-cultural experience across the APAC region and has a special interest in Asian economies. Presently, Raju is powering on senior leaders to fulfil their potential and aspirations amidst change and disruption

Raju
Venkataraman

Partner Executive Coaching & Strategy
Singapore


Mike Kemball
Mike is a sales transformation expert with 30+ years as an accomplished interim Sales Director and Managing Director in 15+ organisations across Telecom, Technology and Industrial sectors in Europe, India, Africa and the Middle East. Client companies and subsidiaries managed were typically $10m - $300m in revenue with sales teams from 10 up to 250 people.

Mike
Kemball

Partner Turnaround & Growth
London


Chennakeshav (Keshav) Adya
Chennakeshav (Keshav) is a seasoned business, marketing and technology executive with 20+ years of global corporate and entrepreneurial experience in building global companies from a concept and in leadership roles spanning M&A execution, deal origination, marketing, brand-building, market research and technology delivery.

Chennakeshav
(Keshav) Adya

Managing Partner Corporate Finance, M&A, Growth
Dubai & London


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