During our involvement with various leaders in multinational organisations we have learned that leaders are often so busy with their day-to-day challenges that they neglect to lead their people and the business effectively.  They are inspired to drive strategy and to empower their employees to be more creative and collaborative, but they find themselves nailed to the chair staring at emails or putting out the operational fires that occur unexpectedly.  

One of our clients identified the above as their own reality and calculated the financial, safety and customer risks on their business with shocking results.  All the leaders in this business were struggling to function effectively on their particular level. Their own fears, uncertainties, frameworks, beliefs and habits prohibited them from dealing with some of the leadership realities.    They were much more comfortable with their technical roles and would quickly slide-back into their previous ways of doing things, especially when the   seats got hot and uncomfortable. Their own safe space.     

Many training programmes train leaders for example, in the ten-step business decision model but don’t equip leaders to make unpopular business calls and to manage the consequences thereof.  Leaders learn how to communicate but they don’t understand their own fears during a discussion especially when they realise that they might lose something.

Growth-Link started the journey with this particular customer assisting them with the design of their own competency framework which defines the expected leadership behaviour on each particular level taking the cultural- and value elements into consideration.  This was followed by a development assessment to identify the specific development areas for each leader against the competency framework. These assessment results gave each individual much insight into their own functioning and why they struggle with some of their leadership functions. Feedback on the assessment results was given together with the next highest manager present which provided insight on some of the practical realities that he/she observed on a daily basis.

The development assessment was followed by a leadership development process (coaching and development) kicked off by the Executive team. This process was also followed with the managers. One of the outcomes was the establishment of a leadership forum.

The objective of the leadership forum was to have open and frank conversations about the behaviour and challenges that the leaders often struggle with.

The end result of the assessment and coaching process was to compile a development programme that would address the following common areas:

1. Leaders experience many stressors and when they are unaware of their personal triggers and they sometimes respond inappropriately; Topic: Change resilience.
2. Leaders very often need to have difficult and tough conversations; Topic: Tough leadership conversations.
3. All leaders have their teams but don’t always know how to create synergy and energy amongst the members to get the optimal functioning of the team; Topic: Build high performing teams.
4. Leaders find themselves taking a decision although they know it is not the best one. Or they don’t take the decision at all? Topic: Break the cycle of wrong/no decisions.
5. Leaders talk about strategies but to make it happen is often the challenge: Topic: Make strategy happen.
6. Relationships are key to any business and leaders should drive these relationships to lifelong partnerships: Topic: Leaders build lifelong partnerships.
7. Communication is key and leaders often struggle to communicate or don’t communicate at all Topic: Communicate with impact.