In most industries there exists a comprehensive, technical skill-oriented training plan covering apprentice, tradesman and master specialties, but there it stops. Yet, what organizations find is a dilemma where leaders that are promoted on the basis of technical capacity alone do not necessarily possess the ability to lead effectively in diverse situations. Missing in much of formal “people” training is a focus on the capacities of leadership, skills that would allow individuals to perform in a variety of senior positions across the organization. And when some “people” or leadership training is present often there is an inconsistency on what development training is provided and how it is accomplished, leaving many executive leaders either lacking in formal leadership training and organizational use flexibility or having any consistency and understanding of leadership expectations.
Compound this lack of focused leadership development training with accessing a number of highly qualified “B” school graduates, fresh out of school and into the work environment with wide-eyed enthusiasm and plenty of ideas for process improvement…but without much in the way of Emotional Intelligence or an idea of what it even means to interact with an entire workforce.
A customer approached us and asked for a comprehensive way to get their entire 40+ executive leadership team on board to help increase awareness of and agility with Emotional Intelligence and other behavior traits and how that impacts the alignment of leadership teams and employee interaction and engagement. Since we believe strategic alignment with mission, business and talent outcomes is essential to get the most ROI for leadership development initiatives we created a 2 day program to accomplish this.
We used the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-Behavior, rated by clinicians as the most usable psychological instrument available to help the participants get to the heart of team performance, efficiency, communication, reducing unhealthy conflict and building trust. Then using 40 years of research and another best in class instrument the Thomas-Kilmann Indicator (Conflict), participants saw how to better drive efficiencies while navigating productively through conflict. Both of these instruments helped them discover that creating high functioning team’s awareness of and tools to leverage individual strengths and “blind spots” are essential. And understanding the correlation of team dynamics and Productivity is included.
Since we live in a world of vast collaborative potential we used a 360 degree instrument and a Boundary Spanning exercise to help them realize much of this potential. All too often, powerful boundaries create borders which splinter groups into Us and Them, leading to limiting possibilities and uninspiring results. We concluded the program by coaching each of the participants individually, providing them a personalized Individual Development Plan which used their actual data from the 360.
Following up the CEO and CMO both praised the interaction, our professionalism and obvious results from the training.