Building A Leadership Academy: Building Bench Strength

Situation

• A company in the Top 25 of the Fortune Private 500
• A president, in charge of a major division and in line for succession to the top spot in the organization, was concerned about the morale of his group and the overall functioning of his top tier managers.
• Being new to the division, the president quickly sensed that people at all levels were dissatisfied.
• The president was eager to use his division as a proving ground for innovative initiatives.
• An initial Organizational Audit pointed the way toward a set of solutions, perhaps the most important was creation of a "Leadership Academy."

Objectives

• Convert command-and-control managers to collaborative and empowering managers
• Create a sense of mission and esprit de corps
• Optimize work/life balance
• Generate a sense of ownership among staff
• Enhance the sense of teamwork
• Become the highest performing division

Solution

• tGCP helped launch ten initiatives, but the highest-profile one was the Leadership Academy program.

• We used a customized version of tGCP’s proprietary Leadership Development methodology, which is built around the Adult Learning Model and an array of our behavior change techniques.
• In addition, the president made the commitment to participate with every group (15 managers) that went through the Academy.

   Some of the other critical elements of the design included:

• Using high-impact assessment data and 360° data
• Harnessing the power of a group process to maximize behavior change and to ensure that changes are sustained over time
• Creating a team development facet to the design, which provided each group (and the company) with a “two-fer”
• Using a powerful self-motivational model to maximize the probability that candidates would assume ownership and set stretch goals for themselves
• Incorporating action-learning assignments as part of a candidate’s inter-session homework
• Having the president attend each of the ten work sessions, demonstrating his total commitment to the Leadership Development process
• Monitoring and evaluating the Academy graduates at three, six, and twelve months

• Enhanced customer relationships and customer retention
• Much broader cross-discipline collaboration
• Increased, higher quality bench strength
• Improved QWL (Quality of Work Life)
• More effective talent draw
• An environment better equipped to create a high-performance culture
• A cohesive sense of purpose
• A reduced rate of turnover
• A lower rate of absenteeism