Leadership Development Programme Tips, Alice Turner – Réncái Group
Introduction
How often do you see high performers promoted into management roles? Do you regularly see these individuals provided with coaching or development opportunities around people management?
Going from a high performing individual contributor, through to an established people manager is not an easy journey. Many of us will have been through this and although some of us may have thrived, many people struggle. This significantly affects their personal performance, along with the performance of those around them.
Our guest blogger this week is Alice Turner, Senior People & Talent Acquisition Manager, Bossa Studios. Before Alice’s currently role she held a variety of People & Change roles at the likes of Jagex, Cambridge Council and Acushnet.
Alice has kindly put together a short blog that talks about some of the key things to consider when running a leadership development programme.
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Leadership Development Programmes – Key tips:
Capturing requirements and project design:
If you want to develop and implement a successful leadership development programme it is important that you take the time to consider what is needed in your company. Every leadership programme will and should look different, across all organisations. Considering your company culture is crucial in setting the tone of the programme.
Engaging key stakeholders:
Engaging key stakeholders throughout your programme is important, however, its critical during the early stages.
What type of Leadership Development do you require?
When thinking of leadership programmes, Alice see’s it being split into two separate sections. The first being management, with upskilling being done in the operational day to day activities and the second being much more inspirational leadership.
Times have changed from the command and control style leadership and employees want autonomy and empowerment to do what they do best. Alice has seen this work in the Gaming industry in particular, where new hires are super passionate about making amazing games but being restricted to harsh rules will hinder their creativity.
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Looking to the future:
When starting to design a leadership programme, it isn’t as easy as just picking one off the shelf, you need to take the time to think about what the company needs. That isn’t just in the immediate future, it is very much about the longer term too.
The C-Suite/Exec Team need to be answering questions on the future of the company.
- What has worked well in the company from a leadership perspective and equally what could have been done better?
- What skills are needed from your leaders to get them to where you need?
- Where does the C-Suite/Exec Team see the company in the next 1/3/5 years?
Once you have understood from your C-Suite what they think is important, engage and include your leaders who are actually going to be taking part in this programme. Who better than those who will be going through it day to day to give you an insight into what skills gaps and support they think that they need.
What does good look like?
As mentioned before, the split of management and leadership should be defined when designing a programme. What do we mean by management? Management is generally associated with the day to day operational tasks such as; managing absence, having difficult conversations, recruitment, salary review and many more. A good manager will do all of these activities but still inspire and have great communication skills.
When you start thinking about a leader, it becomes much more visionary and about removing blockers for people. Leaders have to learn (and it isn’t easy) to accept that they succeed by having a driven, high performing team around them, not by being the superstar anymore. This is hard for some leaders to let go but ultimately the role has changed and they become the one bringing people along the journey and setting the direction for them. Considering not only the vision for the team, but also the wider company.
Take your time and find what works for you!
The early discovery work takes time, and it is really important to not underestimate this. Many of us have seen a leadership programme rolled out without proper thought and then the teams not feeling truly engaged and feeling like yet another training programme has been enforced upon them. Having a leadership programme can really level up where a group of leaders are and get them working cohesively to drive an organisation forward.
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Approach
Once you have done all of the discovery work, the next part is shaping the programme and thinking about what it looks like for the organisation. For a Leadership programme, Alice says she sees it works nicely with external providers supporting and finding the right provider to suit the culture of your company is key.
For the launch of the programme, having the chosen external provider and a C-Suite/Exec sponsor talking about the importance of the programme and the outline is really effective. She has also seen it work well doing psychometrics to kick off the programme followed by 1:1 debriefs on what their style really means to them. Disc profiling is really good for this. It starts the leaders reflecting on how they want to approach the programme and also, if they feel comfortable, sharing their style with others to work as a cohesive team.
The next steps are dependent on the company. For some, a monthly session may work, for others it may need to be bi-monthly depending on where the business is at. It is important to be open minded on this as your leaders already have pressures and you don’t want this to feel like another one added onto it.
To conclude:
So what am I trying to say? Leadership isn’t simple and the definition of a leader will be slightly different at every company. So be ready to invest proper time in the early stages to get the most effective, inspiring programme for the future of your company. Getting your C-Suite/Exec team aligned and on board is so important to making this work, if someone doesn’t turn up to a session without good reason, they will be the ones reinforcing the importance of the programme.
Although this is heavily led by HR, a good LDP programme can transform and drive the business forward.
The Rencai team and Alice would welcome your thoughts and any questions. Please leave a comment below or reach out via email on [email protected]
Harry Wright
Employee Engagement & Client Delivery Consultant
Rencai Group
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