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Activating and Driving a Leadership Culture
A fast growing, high-tech company with a largely “grown from within” middle management population sought out KRG to design a development process that would build capabilities around a core set of leadership practices.
Working closely with the executive team and key stakeholders, KRG designed an ongoing process that included:
- 3.5 day seminar that focused on building skills in self-awareness, interpersonal communication and influence, talent development, change management, and team leadership
- 360-degree feedback to provide insight on leadership strengths and development needs and priorities
- Individual coaching with KRG consultants to build action strategies that leverage strengths and address development areas
- Opportunities to build peer coaching relationships across the organization
- Follow-up feedback and ongoing development opportunities
To date, over 350 managers across business units and worldwide locations have participated in the program with outstanding results. The company now has a leadership team that can leverage a common set of frameworks and language to drive business goals and enhance organization performance. And, because of its superb reputation as the company’s “flagship” leadership development program, there continues to be an internal waiting list for registration.
An Executive Coaching Triumph
"What got you here, may not keep you here." We've heard it so many times and yet for those managers making the transition into senior leadership roles, the cliché becomes all too real.
In this engagement for a U.S. health care company, KRG was brought in to work closely with a senior manager transitioning from Vice President of Product Marketing to Business Unit General Manager. The leader was aware that the requirements of the General Manager's role were different, but he needed help understanding how he could best leverage the talents he had honed in his product marketing role and what leadership practices required his attention.
By implementing our KRG 360-degree feedback process, the manager quickly gained insight into his strengths as a product visionary, results-oriented, decisive manager. And he learned how those competencies would benefit him in his new role. He also came to appreciate how his discomfort with delegation and his tendency to talk over people and become defensive during disagreement would limit his ability to build organizational alignment and drive the business.
Over the next four months this leader created a plan to delegate responsibility and decision authority to his team. He also identified a number of opportunities to use a more collaborative approach to problem solving and developed a self-management practice to keep his defensiveness in check when people challenged his ideas.
After six months, KRG interviewed the initial feedback respondents to determine how much progress this leader had made on his action plan. The feedback was impressive. In each category of development, all respondents had seen significant growth. The leadership team was solid and aligned, the division was meeting its financial goals, and this leader was well on his way to mastering the practices and behaviors necessary to succeed at this level of his organization.
Interpersonal Communications Intervention
What happens when two people with very different styles can’t see eye-to-eye on some fundamental business issues like who owns what? Where are the critical hand-offs? What methods and standards do we use?
KRG was chosen to diagnose the challenges faced between two key executives, identify the current barriers in the relationship, design turnaround strategies, and build the commitment required to take this relationship from ineffective to full-functioning and productive. The process included:
- Data Collection – KRG met with each executive individually to collect perceptions about the current challenges, expectations of the other, and readiness to address the issues.
- Presentation of Summarized Feedback – Met individually with each executive to review the summary themes gathered from the interviews and prepare them for a next-step offsite meeting
- Offsite – KRG facilitated a meeting to:
- clarify role responsibilities and boundaries;
- build a deeper appreciation for the strengths and talents each person brings to the relationship;
- develop strategies that use style awareness to communicate more effectively;
- create a set of communication ground rules to improve understanding and trust; and,
- identify metrics and feedback tools to monitor progress, increase accountability, and acknowledge effort and achievement.
- Follow-up – KRG facilitated weekly 1:1 and team tele-coaching calls to discuss progress, setbacks, and ongoing development strategies.
We know the development path is rarely straight nor smooth, so the follow-up coaching was a critical step to successfully rebuilding this relationship. Three months after the engagement we re-solicited feedback from the two executives, their colleagues, and their direct supervisor (the CEO). All agreed that the relationship had successfully made a dramatic shift and now, instead of investing valuable energy in disruptive, unproductive behaviors, these two leaders are much more interpersonally aligned and productively focused on business results.
