How to Make Your Leadership Programme a Success!


HANS FOGH LAUSTSEN
Master in the Psychology of Organizations
Pg. Organizational Anthropology
St. M.Sc. Neuroscience and Behavioural Change
Is changing leadership behavior in your organization like trying to catch a wet bar of soap?
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How to Make Your Leadership Programme a Success!
Do your managers have folders on their shelves with great material from several leadership programmes?
It's very likely they were taught great theories and listened to inspiration from highly valued senior executives, but it did not affect the organization's general leadership behaviour to the point that matched the program cost.
So, what´s missing?
Working as a leadership programme designer and an executive coach, I identified two components that seem to accelerate the outcome of most leadership programmes:
A leadership programme needs to offer participants both a behavioural design AND a reflective design to change behaviour. This needs to be set up as a company-wide structure to support the growth of a new leadership culture.
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In a large company, I invited 60 managers to learn coaching. The training program was organized into 7 coaching teams, with 1 training day a month over 8 months.
Training days consisted of a lecture on business psychology and 2 sessions of systemic coaching. One manager was the coach, one was the coachee, and others were the reflective team. The managers were encouraged to practice structured reflection on their own decision-making between the training days.
This concept gave the managers a common language to deal with soft issues and provided a method to clear up hard topics. Throughout the programme, they increasingly displayed vulnerability while coaching each other on their management style, which helped them develop a strong rapport with one another.
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A behavioural design ensures the organization's desired leadership behaviours are well-known and accepted. It is specific on what "good leadership" looks like on an everyday basis.
The behavioural design evokes a skillset of specific management actions that supports the business strategy. This needs to be driven by and clearly executed by top managers to set a precedent.
In a small company with a very ambitious growth strategy, I helped the CEO to break down the strategy into an objective hierarchy and coached him to drive his daily leadership from these milestones. The coaching made the CEO reflect on what critical management decisions were necessary and what leadership style he was required to execute.
A reflective design ensures leaders to reflect on their own habitual behaviour and how it affects their decision-making. It must also inspire investigation into how other stakeholder's actions affect the staff and how individual employees react to being led by their managers.
The reflective design is a lot more difficult to manage, hence most work within this framework might be unconscious. Remember the Johari Window. To be beneficial, this will often need to be facilitated by a skilled professional coach or business psychologist.
In a company where time to market was a critical reason for existence, there were a lot of guilt trips and blaming others for missing opportunities. I designed a routine for managers called Pit Stops. A pit stop was a 1-hour "time out" designed to speak up about the nonverbal processes going on in the management group. It was a facilitated team coaching supported by structured individual written reflections on their own decision-making.
Over some time, it became clear to all these highly engaged managers that everyone was trying so hard to build a successful company, but they were working in many different directions to achieve this. The use of written reflections made the managers aware of their own inner reactions to the high speed of decision-making, such as insecurity in making the right choices. Over time, managers reached out to each other to share considerations and discuss the consequences of different options before executing.
A reflective design can be organized as a predefined series of reflective questions to be answered in a manager's logbook. It can be team-based reflection from predefined process questions or it can be offered as a more professional, in-depth dialogues such as coaching.
Therefore, my key to successful leadership programmes is a subtle combination behavioural design and a reflective design.
A facilitated process for making the designs work together is vital to change behaviour.
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This is not a quick fix.
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Giving time and patience to make things work beneath the surface is crucial to converting this effort into business results.
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Let's work together to make
your leadership programme
a success.