Case Study
Launching a "Leadership Academy"
Having been closely involved with a client's project to develop a two-year strategic leadership programme for their senior managers, we were delighted to finally get to the point of launch. We'd decided, with the company's HR Director, to create a high-impact launch that would both be hugely memorable, but that would also quickly flush out, and make tangible, some of the real leadership challenges that the group would face.
We wanted to really push this group; to give them a challenge that would bring out the best and the worst in them, so that we could have some high quality behavioural data on which to build once the programme got underway. Creating something that they could simply get warm feelings of success from would have missed the point; we needed to test where the boundaries were.
So we took them to a remote moorland site, and left them there...
Further Information
After fighting their way through a series of tough challenges, the team faced the toughest on of all: to critically analyse their performance, understand their strengths and weaknesses, and begin to develop plans to improve their leadership capabilities. Some of the primary areas that came out of the initial review stages were:
- Full-length plans: the vital importance of planning, at least in outline, right through to completion.
- Developing "what if" scenarios: circumstances change, plans fail; what will you do then?
- Structured communication: ensuring a framework exists so that, once sub-groups are isolated, they still know whats going on.
- Creating a vision: ensuring that everyone is clear about the goal and has bought into it.
- The importance of reviews: making sure you know whether you're on track or not, so you can do something about it as early as possible.
Get in touch via our contact page, or go back to the case studies page to read more great examples of training that really works.
