Multi-Year Leadership Development program
The Opportunity
This iconic insurance organisation identified the need to elevate the leadership capability of their largest cohort of leaders, 300 Executive Managers, recognised as the engine room of the organisation with the largest potential impact on organisational and staff outcomes.
The remit was to elevate leadership capability and stretch leaders’ focus from transactional operational delivery to a strategic, enterprise lens, working across silos to deliver significant uptake in customer growth within the context of increasing industry reform and disruption. This was to be the first formal leadership development for this cohort in over five years and was very publicly sponsored by the CEO, and the Executive Team.
The Solution
The multi-year project commenced with a 6-month discovery and co-design process through a detailed desktop review and a series of focus groups and interviews with representatives from the cohort, their leaders, the HRBP community and the executive team to understand the world of the Executive Manager and engage them in iterative design.
Being cognisant of the ‘business’ of the context and the ongoing demands of work pressures on participants, a flexible and practical format was adopted, iterating on the design through each phase of the journey. In consultation with participants and senior leaders, an average of 4 - 5 hours of learning per month was seen as meaningful and reasonable. The journey that was co-created with the client included the following learning modalities:
Psychometric assessments and insights building around individual leadership styles
3 x 3 hours virtual “masterclass” workshops
Peer coaching circles to support ongoing embedment of the learning
A business simulation experience where participants competed in a virtual business challenge, competing against each other to win market share
Four livestream events (shared across another Leadership Program with provocation and thought leadership from external and internal speakers)
A full day capstone leadership conference
All supported by monthly share point content drops aligned to program outcomes (whitepapers, frameworks, videos, podcasts etc.)
In year two we extended the program to include “lessons from the field” using the masterclass format to showcase specific client examples of where leaders from outside the organisation shared leadership and team challenges and the strategies employed to overcome these. Participants then worked on cohort groups to utilise specific problem solving frameworks to address real business issues, in an action learning format. We also retained the Livestream elements from Year one and the full day capstone.
The year 1 learning journey below provides an illustration of the participant experience.
The Impact
Improved enterprise thinking and agile decision making – Through the business simulation, leaders flexed their strategic muscle and decision-making capability in a VICA environment
Undertook ‘safe’ experimentation – Leaders experimented with and practised new skills on the job to accelerate learning, working on real organisational issues and sharing their solutions with the broader teams
Built creative comradery – Collaborating & teaming with each other to stretch perspectives, leaders critically challenged each other to achieve high performance
Demonstrated enhanced leadership agility – Leaders developed the ability to ‘perform and transform’, balancing operational excellence with strategic transformation for growth
Learnt from leadership storytelling – Leaders engaged with various leadership subject matter experts and members of the organisation’s executive team to learn from them on challenges at the executive level and how to respond to them
Achieved enhanced accountability – Leaders were accountable for regularly checking-in with their managers to discuss insights and how to embed learning and were also required to share practices and insights with their respective team.
Achieved heightened self-awareness and capability – Through the rich insights gained from the assessment process at the commencement of the program, leaders focused on tracking and rewarding desired shifts in leadership mindsets and behaviours
Enhanced leadership performance and potential – Evaluation post year 1 and year 2 of the program indicated positive changes in terms of leadership impact on teams, job performance and the evaluation of leadership potential