Leadership and leadership-team development
Leadership is a practice that is exercised both individually and together - and always takes place within a context.
Leadership is about setting direction and creating results with and through others. Developing your leadership practice is therefore about both strengthening personal leadership and being aware that leadership always takes place within a context. That's why we work both to strengthen the individual's leadership and to build relational and organisational leadership capacity - for example cross-cutting collaboration, communication, creating followership and building trust and psychological safety. That's why we call it leadership development rather than leader development.
Strategic and operational leadership
The leader's task is to ensure that the core task is solved, as well as to regulate boundaries and distribute work. Exercising leadership looks different depending on which leadership level you are at. Strategic leadership is about setting direction, being forward-looking, and being able to translate the demands of the surrounding world into long-term objectives. Operational leadership is about creating concrete results by translating those goals into concrete tasks through, among other things, effective communication.
At the same time, it is essential to strengthen the relationship between the two leadership levels. This requires understanding organisations and the leadership of them as an ecosystem, where the surrounding world, organisational culture and the leadership of structure, processes and the individual all influence one another. As a leader, it is therefore central to have a particular focus on creating connections, facilitating collaboration, working with empowerment and self-organisation, and allowing the complexity that comes with it. In this way, it all starts with you as a leader! It is about being able to relinquish control, release autonomy and distribute decision-making power - and thereby energy.
How we design programmes
We always design leadership development based on the latest research in the field. We work with three learning components:
- Knowledge and understanding of the right leadership behaviour.
- Attention to and reflection on the specific context in which leadership can or must be exercised.
- Initiating actual actions and the building of skills.
Learning is achieved through a cyclical movement between the three components. In this way, meta-skills are also trained: translating knowledge into action, reflecting on one's own action, and seeking out and processing feedback.
We prefer to set a concrete task out front that needs to be solved anyway - for example a new strategy - and then apply the 70-20-10 model as far as possible: 70% learning through practice, 20% feedback and 10% through formal activities.
Our leadership development therefore typically runs along three tracks:
- A shared track, where participants gain common insight through modules.
- An individual development track, where each person works on their own concrete development goals, set after dialogue with their own manager and/or their own employees.
- A networking and sparring track, where participants jointly reflect on both their own actions and those of the network group.
Dynamics in leadership teams
Leadership is also exercised in leadership teams. They can be the seed of focused problem-solving, sparring on concrete tasks and leader wellbeing
- but also of draining discussions and long, predictable meetings. It is therefore about creating aligned and psychologically safe leadership teams that focus on the added value the group creates. That isn't so easy in practice. Research, however, offers some markers in the form of the preconditions and processes for the work that effective leadership teams have - and those are what we work actively with. We also work with group dynamic states that describe the collaboration culture of leadership teams, as well as how we, as individuals in a leadership team, relate to ourselves and one another.
Programmes we typically offer
- Together on leadership - shared leadership development for the entire management group.
- From strategy to everyday life - implementation power in the leadership team.
- Personal leadership and leadership in complexity - for new and experienced leaders.
- Strategic leadership and leadership in and of change - rational and emotional dynamics.
- Leadership under cross-pressure - for staff managers and professional coordinators.
- Trust and clarity - leading collaboration across boundaries.