Leadership Institute
Already some time ago we finalized the Services Leadership Institute for EMEA. It was running over an entire fiscal year. Last July, together with the Business Sponsor of this Institute our Vice President for the Services Delivery organization who is one of my internal clients, we selected 15 Senior Managers who were regarded as potential successors of our current Directors. Our Directors had to present their candidates in individual interviews according to criteria we use to assess our leadership bench strength in each organization. For each criteria there had to be evidence from former achievements and behaviors the candidate had demonstrated in the past:
Performance Over Time
Business & People Results Delivery
Goals & Expectations
Developing Others
Values (Courage, Collaboration, Innovation, Integrity, Pace)
Future Potential
Learning Agility
Potential Next Moves
Career Aspiration
Ability of Development to Address Weaknesses
These two main elements would also be the X- and Y-axis in the 9 Box diagram we would do for the purpose of bench strength assessment in a Director's or Vice President's organization. There were also some more practical criteria like level of spoken English, accomplished the regular trainings from our Manager curriculum, etc.
The main idea to put an Institute in place was that we regularly did assess our talent and bench strength in the past, but we did not consciously build on the results to prepare people for the Director level. On the other hand we did not have lots of budget for this purpose. Therefor any action should be something that is done from the business for the business without involvement of too many external resources.
I was facilitating the design team and also parts of the face to face sessions, one Director from the business was working with us and playing the role of host in the sessions, facilitating the daily flow and additionally we had an external consultant supporting us with the design and acting as a coach for the participants.
The main element to enable the learning from this Institute were business projects. We selected 3 key business critical projects and for each of them a member of the leadership team as Sponsor who's responsibility was not only to drive the business result from the project but also to have participants focus on self learning, learning from each other, e.g. by creating an open feed-back culture. The learning strategy we developed was:
Me learning about me,
Sun/Me learning about Sun,
Sun learning about Me.
3 face to face sessions at different locations in Europe were the framework around the business projects to which we invited top executives for discussions and presentations. People were given the opportunity to get visibility, network and learn from our leaders.
In retrospective it was not easy to sell the concept of self learning. We learned that expectations for some were very much in the direction of having a high level university class with pitches from well known professors. Nevertheless I believe that most participants took away something for their personal development, some feed-back, some further clarity on the 360 degree feed-back that they brought to the Institute and for sure an extended network of collegues and Executives. A first step for them having reflected their behavior to maybe change some of that to become more rounded leaders.
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