LSG: Change Leadership Programme
Boost our agility
One of the benefits of our Execution Agility model is the level of clarity it provides in the relationship between the executive team and senior management. The model provides space for senior managers to do their job AND assurance for executives that the standard required has been understood.
During the training, participants were encouraged not just to understand the model’s steps but to apply them to their work and to do real work. In fact, using the Execution Agility model for the first time, one team achieved breakthrough on a difficult challenge in a matter of minutes that might have taken weeks to resolve in their habitual style.
The challenge
The client asked us to develop the executive team and their direct reports to become better leaders of complex change. Our client was working in an extremely fast paced market with a team of entrepreneurial and commercially astute and hard to ‘train’ leaders. The pace of change was challenging and their habitual approaches to leading change were failing, resulting in an unacceptable level of chaos, rework, executive frustration and low responsiveness to market conditions. The business result they required was agility and pace.
The solution
We designed a programme around our model of Execution Agility. The model is predicated on the idea that when the environment is complex and change is fast-paced, engineering or command models of leadership do not work. The executive team cannot and should not try to create perfect change plans – no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Instead they should focus heavily on clarifying their intended outcomes and standards and create enough alignment for leaders and managers closest to the action to make swift decisions.
The Execution Agility model describes five steps which when followed by a leadership group facing change or challenging project provide high levels of autonomy with high levels of alignment. The result of the rigorous application of the steps is better agility.
The programme consisted of three modules which focused on Getting It, Using It and Embedding It. Participants were encouraged not just to understand the steps but to apply them to their work and to do real work during the modules. Using the five-step model for the first time, one team achieved breakthrough on a difficult challenge in a matter of minutes that might have taken weeks to resolve in their habitual style.
The result
One of the benefits of the model is the level of clarity it provides in the relationship between executive team and senior management. Frustration over changing deadlines and executive meddling began to be replaced by robust dialogue resulting in clarity of outcome. The model provides space for senior managers to do their job AND assurance for executives that the standard required have been understood.
In an evaluation of the approach in the organisation, the participants of the programme reported as follows:
LESS: rework, autocracy, micromanaging, silo behaviour, e-mail, duplication, fire-fighting and
MORE: clarity, buy-in, time to think, direction, structure, alignment, focus, permission to challenge, energy, creativity, and right first time.
