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Curriculum Overview
Concire has a very specific definition of leadership – leaders make people better as a result of their presence, and make sure that impact lasts in their absence.
Leaders set their people up to excel in a specific competitive reality and to adapt quickly when that reality changes. These challenges require unprecedented degrees of responsiveness, flexibility and creativity at all levels of an organization. And that’s a leadership numbers game. Most organizations don’t need better leadership. They need more leaders.
Our Decision to Lead seminar helps firms to get more of their people “off the leadership bench” and drive change in environments where excellence is the target output.
The curriculum focuses on surfacing obstacles to performance in an organization’s culture and behavior – particularly inhibitors to improvement and learning -- and helps individuals overcome barriers to leadership. It emphasizes creating an environment where:
- Leadership is customized to specific performance goals
- Dynamism drives organizational design, including learning and improvement
- Mental models shaping employee behavior are aligned with strategic choices
- Leaders surface and resolve personal barriers to impact, unlocking organizational performance
The seminar’s structure typically includes high-energy, interactive discussions on the best thinking in organizational behavior, design of a personal leadership action agenda, and targeted case discussions to stimulate creative problem-solving.
Sample seminar structure
Audience: 60 top executives from a high-growth financial services firm entering new markets
Time: 1.5 days
Session 1. Conceptual Framing: Defining the Leadership Task (60 Minutes)
This introductory session offers participants a customized survey of relevant ideas in the leadership and organizational behavior scholarship. The discussion focuses on the levers leaders use to drive change in environments where excellence is the target output.
Example: Leadership as a Design Choice
Despite the mythology around leadership, leadership choices are not inherently good or bad. Effective leaders make decisions that reinforce their business models and reflect their competitive reality – ineffective leaders ignore these contexts. In other words, leadership can be seen as a series of design choices, as operational as choosing the right funding mechanism or investing in the right service attributes. These choices can be divided into two categories: the things that happen in the presence of a leader (e.g.,
designing a competitive strategy) and the things that happen in his or her absence (e.g., creating a culture of improvement).
Session 2. Experiential Learning: Leading in Uncertainty (90 minutes)
This team-based exercise uses an educational tool called "The Electric Maze" to teach vivid insights about the organizational challenges of engaging in collaborative learning and innovation. The tool is a grid-patterned rug with 54 squares implanted with electronic programmable sensors that beep whenever pressure is applied. The instructor programs the maze in advance to create a pathway of non-beeping contiguous squares from one side to the other. Because participants have no information about how to traverse the maze
correctly, experimentation--a systematic iterative process of trial and failure--is needed to develop a solution.
Learning Objective: To explore leadership challenges in new, uncertain and changing contexts.
Session 3. Direct Impact: Leadership Case and Discussion (90 minutes)
After reviewing the case materials prior to the workshop’s start, participants examine the leadership choices of managers and teams who are trying to impact complex competitive and organizational conditions.
Cases are sourced from a range of industries, which may be deliberately unrelated to the participants’ sector(s). This choice permits energetic exploration of ideas unburdened by the specifics of participants’ own businesses, which will be addressed in detail in other sessions.
Case Example: TeleFun, Inc. (disguised)
TeleFun, Inc., a successful player in the U.S. telephone industry, is deciding whether and how to enter the high-speed digital subscriber line (DSL) market following a small pilot test. There is pressure to enter the market quickly because of the push by competitors to roll out high-speed Internet access. But TeleFun has worked hard to create a brand based on high-quality service, and an unsuccessful entry into a new market could jeopardize its investments. Additionally, TeleFun has achieved truly outstanding customer
satisfaction in its telephone service business. Given that TeleFun seems to have what it takes to launch new services successfully, DSL would seem to be just another opportunity for it to succeed.
Learning Points: Leadership must be customized to the competitive and organizational context. As that context changes, so too, must leadership practices.
Questions to guide participants’ preparation:
- How should management structure the new DSL organization?
- What were the key leadership decisions TeleFun made throughout the case?
- Consider your own organizational design and systems – how well do they reflect your competitive reality?
Session 4: Indirect Impact: Culture Change Video Case and Workshop (120 minutes)
Some scholars define a leader’s most important challenge as the stewardship of organizational culture. Culture trumps all other drivers of performance, and a CEO’s true title could be “Chief Culture Officer.” This session adopts this point of view and explores the mechanisms leaders have to create a culture that enables specific performance goals in his or her absence.
After briefly exploring the creation and maintenance of culture at IDEO, an innovation services firm, participants turn to an analysis of their own teams and organizations to:
- Diagnose the key elements of their corporate and team culture(s)
- Expose the potential levers of culture change in their own environments
- Develop a cultural action agenda
Session 5. Individual Leadership Assessment (90 minutes)
This final formal session solidifies the learning from previous sessions and switches the unit of analysis to individual participants. The session facilitates reflection on participants’ specific leadership challenges, focusing on identifying and overcoming barriers to leadership impact. These barriers include:
- Focus on individual advancement at the expense of service and impact
- Unproductive relationships with colleagues and competitors
- Resistance to leading without expanded authority
- Weak support networks
The session’s output is a specific plan of action for leading individual and organizational change.
Session 6. Individual Feedback (optional)
Participants reveal a tremendous amount of information about themselves – and their organizations – in a training environment where new ways of learning, collaboration and communication are required. This optional session provides a space for interested individuals to engage the Concire team about their observations and explore opportunities on a personal and team level.
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