Transformational leadership delivering on strategy in tech

This large multinational tech company identified a need to increase leadership effectiveness across the organisation to ensure strategic business unit initiatives were executed. Together, we co-designed a programme to develop managers into transformational leaders, with capabilities in line with the company’s values and mission aimed at enabling them to deliver on strategy with outstanding results. 

Focus

This company spans the globe with over 110k people worldwide. To keep pace at this scale and in a highly competitive global market, this leadership development programme was commissioned to serve the Heads of Function & Area Managers based in Ireland and working as part of the regional European or Global organisations.

Action

The programme utilised a blend of delivery modes: instructor-led training & facilitation blended with peer learning groups, 1:1 coaching and line manager interactions (all delivered virtually).

There were key development topics around which we built the programme:

• Personal mastery: self-awareness, emotional resilience, and peak performance to drive change leadership
• Strategic thinking and decision-making: sense-making, adaptive leadership and decision-making in complexity
• Business leadership: business acumen, customer focus and entrepreneurship
• Team leadership: trust, purpose, vision, collaboration; developing accountability for execution and results
• Global influencing skills: influencing, communication and inclusive leadership skills to become more effective at collaborating across the organisation

Finally, the core programme design was based on an experiential learning model, with participants encouraged to bring real experiences and challenges from their work life into the four focused modules. In this context they could reflect, test ideas with peers, share learnings and plan new approaches to take back to their team. There were also supporting learning resources such as videos, articles and books available to participants.

Impact

The effectiveness of our bespoke programme was driven by the experiential learning and blended design. The end result was cadre of leaders of had:

• Clarity about the organisation’s mission, their role in delivering it, and their own development path
• Courage made possible by psychological safety, to raise issues, to experiment and learn from mistakes
• Empathy for deeper conversations with their people, and to empower
• Curiosity to explore multiple perspectives and new business opportunities
• Collaboration to work with colleagues in cross-business peer learning groups

The team included Andrea Cusack, Aoife Keane and Brenda Cross.